HASS Foods was born out of a commitment to good food, family and good health.
Cathy Wood founded HASS Foods because she believes that all families should be able to enjoy tasty, healthy food, no matter where they live and no matter how busy their lifestyle is.
But, let’s go back to the beginning of Cathy Wood’s journey.
Ironically, HASS Foods founder and five star chef Cathy Wood couldn’t boil an egg when she finished high school and went to work as a strapper and farm hand on a property near the small community of Pingrup in Western Australia’s Great Southern.
Luckily, Cathy was fed by the farming family she worked for at the time.
After her gap year in farming, Cathy decided to pursue her dream of becoming a chef. She successfully secured a chef apprenticeship and undertook most of it at the five star Hyatt Regency Hotel in Perth.
Cathy’s five star culinary skills were honed by working across all facets of the hotel. When she completed her apprenticeship the Hyatt offered her the opportunity to work as a chef in any part of the hotel. Cathy however wanted to stretch her wings and build her culinary skills, and so took a position as Chef at the Kakadu National Park Crocodile Hotel in the Northern Territory. She then went on to work as Chef at the Voyages Ayres Rock Resort.
Seeking to further her interest in food, nutrition and health, Cathy successfully applied for a position as manager at the special diets kitchen at Princess Margaret Hospital. She went on to tackle a tripartite project between Curtin University’s Health Sciences Department, the Western Australian Health Department and Healthways to enhance the nutritional standards of commercial kitchens in Perth. This project was so successful that it was awarded the Curtin University Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence. To sharpen her training and business management skills, Cathy also completed a Bachelor of Arts (Training and Development) with Edith Cowan University in Perth.
Enterprising and creative by nature, Cathy was always on the lookout for an opportunity to run a hospitality business of her own. Cathy wanted an opportunity to use her knowledge to incorporate healthy alternatives into the food she provided to customers, and saw an opportunity to do far more with food than most hospitality businesses were doing.
So Cathy and her husband Sean bought Stumpy’s Roadhouse in Brookton, a farming community two hours from Perth in Western Australia’s wheatbelt. Cathy upgraded the menu to make the standard roadhouse fare as healthy as possible, and to offer healthy and delicious alternatives to the community, such as healthy take away meals like stroganoffs and curries. Cathy’s work saw her awarded the Western Australian Telstra Business Women’s Award in 2004.
Owning and running a roadhouse means working long hours. Cathy started looking at how she could offer more healthy food to customers that was both super tasty and easy to make at home. She wanted everyone in the family to be able to enjoy healthy food rather than seeing it as a boring poor cousin.
Cathy is also a mother of two, so she knows how challenging it can be to get healthy food into small people.
So Cathy started experimenting with dehydrating food. She discovered however that dehydrating food wasn’t highly effective in creating nutritious foods that could be stored in the pantry and used whenever convenient. The dehydrating process also increased the sugar content of the vegetables and fruit that she was dehydrating, an outcome she wouldn’t tolerate.
Cathy then switched to freeze drying food, which proved far more successful in locking in the nutritional value and flavour of the vegetables and fruits, and allowed them store well for long periods of time. The freeze dried vegetables and fruits could be used in a variety of ways to create tasty food, including bread. Cathy worked tirelessly to trial a wide variety of different combinations of vegetables, spices and flours to get the balance right. The result is the irresistibly delicious HASS range of bread mixes.
The HASS Foods range of bread mixes is the culmination of Cathy’s almost 40 years of experience and knowledge as a chef working across all aspects of the hospitality industry. The products are also the result of her passion for making heathy eating easy for all Australian families as well as tasty and interesting to share around the dinner table.
What family wouldn’t enjoy purple steak, salad and bacon sandwiches made with scrumptious and nutritious beetroot bread for their Sunday night dinner?
Yum, yum, yummo!
