A note from Real Food Blends® iso Nutricia on the discontinuation of Abbott PediaSure Harvest™ and Ensure Harvest™
We are aware that Abbott recently announced the discontinuation of PediaSure Harvest and Ensure Harvest. This news may affect you, as people with feeding tubes use these products. If you were previously using PediaSure Harvest or Ensure Harvest and are now looking for an alternative, Real Food Blends can be an option.
Real Food Blends is available and ready to serve you. As the only ready-to-feed true blenderized diet option made from 100% real food, our products offer nutritional variety from simple ingredients across six meals and one snack.
Real Food Blends can be used for children and adults as a primary source of nutrition, as well as in conjunction with commercial formula or a home-blended diet. Our meals and snack are covered by many insurance plans under HCPCS code B4149.
Try Real Food Blends by purchasing our trial kit (6 meals, one of each flavor) here.
To learn more about transitioning to Real Food Blends, download our transition guide. Talk with your healthcare team before making any changes to your diet.
Real Food Blends Products are Available and Not Impacted by the Lyons Magnus Recall
You may have heard that Lyons Magnus announced that, following continued collaboration and consultation with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, it has expanded its voluntary recall of nutritional and beverage products due to illness concerns. This recall encompassed formulas for patients with feeding tubes, such as Ensure Harvest™ and PediaSure Harvest™ from Abbott, as well as multiple products from Kate Farms®.
You can read more about the Magnus announcement by following this link here.
Nutricia products, including Real Food Blends®, are not involved in the Lyons Magnus recall.
Real Food Blends products remain safe options to provide real food and nutritional variety to people with feeding tubes, as recommended by a healthcare professional. At Real Food Blends, our mission is to bring true blenderized diet to as many people with feeding tubes as possible.
Real Food Blends meals & snack provide nutritional variety from real food ingredients across our six meals and one snack.
Transitioning to Real Food Blends
If your current product is on the recall mentioned above and you are looking to transition to Real Food Blends products , please speak with your healthcare provider to determine if Real Food Blends would be a good fit for you or your loved one.
REAL FOOD BLENDS Products:
- Blenderized meals for people with feeding tubes
- Can be used for children and adults
- Real Food Blends meals & snack can be used as bolus, pump or gravity feeding with 14Fr G-Tube or larger (if consistency with gravity or pump feeding is a concern, dilute with fluids).
Real Food Blends is made from whole food and therefore the consistency might vary. Real Food Blends is thicker than your traditional tube feeding formula. This is intentional, as having a thicker consistency may allow for better GI tolerance. Read more tips on transitioning to Real Food Blends from your current formula.
What can you do next?
- Speak with your healthcare provider to determine if Real Food Blends would be a good fit for you or your loved one.
- Ask your provider to order you a free sample, or purchase our trial kit. (1 of each of our meals, 6 meals total)
Need assistance covering cost of Real Food Blends?
Navigating insurance landscape can be challenging. That is why we created Nutricia Navigator. Our Navigator experts will provide personalized one-on-one support to help guide you through the complexities of product coverage.
As a Real Food Blends customer you have access to Nutricia Navigator, our reimbursement assistance program, for personalized support to help you navigate the complexity of insurance coverage. Our experts are available to help with questions.
To get started with our Navigator team:
Please visit Nutricia Navigator to read all of the details!
Call (800) 365-7354 9:00am – 6:00pm ET Monday-Friday
Email Navigator@Nutricia.com
The Joy of Real Food Blends – Winners!
HAPPY NEW YEAR! A special thank you goes out to all who entered to win our meals & calorie booster. We were honestly shocked at the amount of entries!
Listed below are the daily prize winners. Each won a Sample Pack of our meals and our Coconut Calorie Booster. If your name is listed below, check your email for details tomorrow. For those of you new to Real Food Blends, we hope your prize is just the start of your real food enjoyment.
Drumroll please! The Joy of Real Food Blends Sweeps daily winners are:
Susan O from Vermont
Kelly V from New York
Jennifer H from Texas
Brian L from Tennessee
Mike W from Missouri
Tammy C from Arizona
April S from Illinois
John H from California
Jessica B from Colorado
David A from Indiana
Kimberly K from Florida
Deborah C from Wyoming
Tarcara E from Florida
Lynn V from Wisconsin
Lisa C from Georgia
Todd T from Alabama
William B from North Carolina
Deb N from Wisconsin
Carol D from New Hampshire
Dawn O from Massachusetts
Joan T from California
Chaney R from New York
Robin F from Arizona
Dollie T from Michigan
Leslie W from Oregon
Kelsey B from Idaho
Lillian J from Michigan
Luci B from Florida
Our Grand Prize and runner up winners will be notified & announced shortly!
(Not So) Accidental Advocates
Gabe & Anthony preparing Real Food Blends meals for shipping.
If you supported our crowdfunding campaign or received one of our sample meals, chances are that your order helped give a disabled person a job.
When I set out to create Real Food Blends, I recognized that there was an opportunity to not just provide easier access to real food, but also to be a better corporate citizen. That’s why the development of these meals took longer than expected. It would have been faster and cheaper to add some preservatives or come out with only one variety, but that’s not what I wanted for my son. That’s also why we sourced the (beloved) squirrel syringes and decided to sell them for just about our cost.
Doing better is also why we have made a commitment to providing meaningful employment to disabled people. Instead of renting our own warehouse and staff, or paying a private fulfillment house, we have consciously chose to help employ disabled workers.
As we move forward, we have reaffirmed our commitment to disability inclusion and partnered with a large disabled workforce fulfillment house to label and ship the cases of Real Food Blends to our customers. When the cases arrive at your doorstep, know that not only are you getting 100% real food, but you have helped provide a disabled person with meaningful work.
Not only does this make good business sense for Real Food Blends, supporting these programs and facilities now can help make sure that people like my son AJ have meaningful employment, and a sense of satisfaction that only a job well done can provide.
—
Randy Lewis, the former SVP of logistics at Walgreens and an advisor to Real Food Blends, has guided us through this process to make sure we could deliver for our customers, and to our mission of disability inclusion. His book, No Greatness Without Goodness: How a Father’s Love Changed a Company and Sparked a Movement, is now available and his proceeds are going to charity. (You can read more about his story – and how he became an “Accidental Advocate” – here.)
We are giving away 5 free copies of the book to the first 5 people that post they want one on our Facebook wall or Tweet us.
Note: Our meals are produced and packaged in a fully USDA / FDA regulated facility and only sent to the fulfillment house for shipping and handling once they are packaged and sealed into cases.
Production Date is Set!
It’s official! The first Real Food Blends meals will be produced on January 13th, 2014! Although this date reflects a delay from what we expected when we first launched our IndieGoGo crowdfunding campaign, we are very excited to have a firm date set. As you may know if you’ve been reading along with our updates, getting to this point has not been easy, but I didn’t start Real Food Blends because I thought it was going to be easy! (Only worth it:)
After production is complete, the meals will go to a certified warehouse to be packed and shipped to our customers. Those of you that backed our crowdfunding campaign can expect your meals by the end of January. (International shipping will take an additional 1-2 weeks to arrive).
So where can I buy Real Food Blends meals?
We will begin pre-selling the meals here on RealFoodBlends.com in January. This first production is being done in limited quantities so we encourage you to order early!
We apologize for the delays. We thank you for your patience and support. Through the ups and downs, delays and victories, your support and encouragement has been amazing and is a big part of what helped us get to this point. Thank you! As always, stay tuned on Facebook or Twitter for more updates (NOTE: We have a special announcement coming this week!)
Julie Bombacino
Founder & CEO, Real Food Blends
