Palena Fresh is fighting the war on preservatives while making your life easier. Our signature range of freshly frozen garlic, ginger, chilli and herbs are full of flavour without any nasties. Stack them neatly in your freezer and pop a cube or two straight into your pot for real flavour, without the mess or waste!

Mel, the Palena Fresh Creator was born on beautiful Wednesday morning…. Joking! not that far back!

Mel’s a chef, a pretty decent one too. She spent her career running, opening and consulting kitchens all across Sydney, for many years and managed to pick up an award or two along the way.

If you get the chance to meet her, you’ll know pretty quickly, she’s passionate about many things, food and nutrition being in the top 3.

Over the years of her consulting chefs and restaurants, one thing started to really peeve her off. The amount of packaged food that was brought into these kitchens, when it just wasn’t necessary.

Eventually, she fell in love and had to make the decision to stop working so much. For the first time ever, she had the time to see her friends. However, pretty quickly, she noticed the same thing outside of the cheffing world too. Every persons fridge she went into had the same packaged, preservative filled crap in it.

This peeved Mel off even more and one day, standing in front her of friend Sarah’s fridge, she made a decision. She was going to change the world! (A little extreme I know, unless you know Mel).

Mel’s now on a mission to recreate as many convenient, packaged things as she can, by changing the way products are packaged and stored. Most of the time, there isn’t a need to add preservatives, the storage just needs a little tweaking!

There’s many reasons big companies do add the crap and here’s a few of them-

  • They get to put less ‘actual’ product in and use lots of other ‘ingredients’ as fillers, but still charge you through the nose for it.
  • The preservatives make the product ‘Shelf Stable’. This allows companies to mass produce, getting products cheaper, but sill charging you a ship load for it.
  • By making the products ‘Shelf Stable’, companies are also benefiting, by having a much longer expiry date on their product, than what should naturally occur (by sterilising the hell out of it)  thus meaning they can produce more and hold it for longer, until you open it that is, then you’ve only got a week or so, ironic. (They’ve got to make sure you’re gonna buy some more ASAP!)

Anyway, Mel thought she would start with recreating the bases of your food (HERBS). If she can make cooking from scratch taste AhMayZing and still be as easy (if not easier) than the current products people are buying, then maybe, people would enjoy cooking from scratch again, without it taking the time, effort and money you think its going to – and still be putting all the good stuff inside you!

SO! the more of these trays of pure frozen genius-ness you buy, the faster you will all fund Mel’s next creation, and if you don’t know Mel, shell look after you, Promise!