Photo by Nicholas Wray, courtesy of Granola Girl
The words “food truck” and “healthy” rarely go together. Yet locally-grown business Granola Girl is going the mobile route, bringing good eats to Sacramento yogis and juice cleansers in mid-November.
Among the truck offerings: granola bowls with homemade almond milk; superfood smoothies; veggie and fruit juice; and plant-based sandwiches. It’s not a de facto vegan, gluten-free truck, but a lot of the options are vegan and gluten-free.
Saba Rahimian, a 24-year-old former yoga teacher, started Granola Girl in February. She’s been selling a line of granolas and snacks online, as well as appearing at yoga classes and special events like TBD Fest. She emphasizes that Granola Girl was born first and foremost out of her love for food.
“I’m Iranian-American and I grew up in a family and household where food was just a huge part of life,” she says. “But our relationship to food was cultural and not necessarily associated with nutrition. As I grew older, I wanted certain goals for my own body and fitness level, and I started seeing family members get diabetes and have high cholesterol. I felt like I had to work so much harder to reach the goals I wanted.”
She turned to the yoga community and took notes on what fellow athletes ate: raw kale, turmeric, chia seeds, flax seeds, ginger, maca powder. But the way those ingredients were prepared—a.k.a. with little preparation—didn’t taste so great.
So Rahimian went into the kitchen and experimented. Out came most of the recipes that will be used aboard the Granola Girl food truck.
Her granola is notably crunchy, warmed with spices and loaded with nuts and seeds. An added nutritional boost comes from her syrup, infused with raw hemp protein, turmeric and maca powder. But again, Granola Girl is not a vegan business—Rahimian is all about deliciousness. Just look to “The Granola Guy’s Brunch,” a bowl of bacon- and cranberry-laced granola, two soft poached eggs, pepper jam and chives. Yum.
To make it all happen, Rahimian teamed up with Adam Lovelace, a newcomer to Sacramento with cooking and management experience at Masa’s and Millennium in San Francisco and The Girl and the Fig in Sonoma.
Rahimian says most meals and juices will fit in the $7-$14 price range. Snacks, such as her best-selling dates stuffed with pistachio butter and seeds, will be sold for $3-$5. She admits the truck probably won’t be super popular outside breweries, but she plans to hit food truck, music and yoga festivals and athletic events on the weekends. Otherwise, find the truck on Granola Girl’s headquarters at 5401 H Street next month.
