About Us
History
International Fabulous Flats™ is a relatively new product line but the two founders have, between them, more than 60 years of experience in the food, beverage and bakery industries.
Sam Ajmera, who built and operated Canada's leading specialty bread bakery, Dough Delight, was making 5 million bagels a day when he sold his bakery to Canada Bread in the early 1990s. (And if that weren't enough throughput, Sam also baked 3 million croissants a day.)
Jim White, following a successful career as an award-winning, food writer, joined Loblaw Companies in Toronto, Canada, in the early-80s. Realizing there was a need for tasty, healthier-for-you foods, he coined the term "President's Choice" and developed the first 1,500 products for the upscale program, considered the grandfather of ALL premium private label programs in North America.
Afterward, as a consultant, Jim developed products, or private label programs, for many of America's leading supermarkets and mass merchandisers. As well, he was hired to reformulate highly visible products for Fortune 500 food companies, which wanted their national brands to taste as good as the private label products Jim had brought to market. In total, Jim has brought to market more than 8,000 foods and beverages.
Whenever Jim needed to create a bakery item for a client, he turned to Sam for advice, wisdom or plain out asked Sam to make the baked good. Over time, Sam and Jim became good friends and their children often spent time at a common dining table.
After Sam sold his bakery in the early 90s, he bought a rice business in Arkansas and transformed it into one of the largest independent specialty rice growers/producers in North America. He turned the business over to his two sons and thought he would retire.
Meanwhile, Jim moved to Napa Valley, CA, in the mid-90s to start a new life – to return to writing about food and wine, two of his passions, and also to make wine.
In late 2003, Sam and Jim reconnected. They agreed they were both bored with their respective retirements and decided to do something about it: "Let's buy a bakery, fix it up and make some new products!" Sam urged.
Jim bought in. The pair scouted sites across North America and in the end, settled for a small bakery in Toronto, where Sam and his family live.
Sam and Jim bought the assets of the bakery, retired the debt, retired the owner and moved the machinery to a new 30,000–square-foot facility (which they outgrew in two years).
They named their new bakery FGF Brands, the FGF standing for "Functional Gourmet Foods."
"We weren't sure what our first commercial baked goods would be, but we knew that they had to be healthier-for-you, and wanted to load them with nutrients – so they did something good for you. They had to be Functional," says Sam.
The pair decided that the first category they would tackle was muffins. "So many commercial muffins are lousy," says Jim. "They are often filled with poor ingredients and when we started, most bakeries were still using hydrogenated oil – which I had been removing from the baked goods I'd been developing for the previous 20 years!"
After the bakery team developed 135 recipes for tasty, nutrient-dense, healthier-for-you muffins, Sam's sons took over:
Tejus ramped up production so that the bakery could produce 500,000 muffins a day.
Ojus went out on the road to drum up sales.
Today, FGF Brands, the parent company of International Fabulous Flats™ flatbreads, supplies North America's best-known coffee chain with tasty, nutrient-dense muffins.
Once the muffin program was humming along, Sam and Jim decided to redefine, if not invent, a new food category – flatbreads.
"Every culture in the world has a national flatbread – we decided to celebrate this fact and bring many tasty, ethnic flatbreads to market under one umbrella, one brand," says Jim. "We called our brand International Fabulous Flats™."
"Essentially, we think of ourselves as the Ben & Jerry's of bakery," explains Jim. "We use all-natural ingredients to make tasty products, which we bring to market with fun packaging."
"As Sam and I are doing this because we want to, not because we have to, we take no shortcuts, take no dives, in the development process, or in the production, of our flatbreads."
In short, Sam and Jim are driven by their passions, and tempered by their experience.
The men have ignited the passions of their bakery product development team, taught them to think of themselves as "adventurers of taste."
Sam knew that in order to make authentic naan, he would first have to invent and build a continuous tandoor oven, capable of reaching 1200°F degrees – so that naan would bake in seconds, just as they do in the tandoor of an Indian restaurant.
It took a year, many trials and a few million dollars, but the bakery team finally built – and now has a patent pending on – the world's first continuous tandoor oven. This enables the bakery to keep up with demand, producing more than 1 million International Fabulous Flats™ Tandoori Naan a week! And every single one of these flatbreads is still hand-stretched!
Within a month of launch, International Fabulous Flats™ Tandoori Naan were named "The Best New Food Product in the US," by Preferred Foods, a leading, and respected, food industry magazine.
In the U.S., Whole Foods Market was the first national chain to recognize the merit – and potential – of our tasty, tandoor-baked naan and listed our flatbreads across the country. To them, we are eternally grateful; they took a chance on us when we were nobodies and in the ensuing period, we have prospered together.
In Canada, Loblaws, recognizing our baking skills and the product opportunity, asked us to reformulate and make a "President's Choice Naan," which became one of the hottest "PC" items launched in the last few years.
International Fabulous Flats™ has had some remarkably strong press; we have had to move to a larger facility to keep up with demand and we are besieged by positive fan mail from consumers who write to tell us how much they love our flatbreads and about the many recipes, which they have developed using them.
(Jim was doing an admirable job keeping up with all the positive mail, personally answering every single email, but the task became an all-day job – and we needed him back in the kitchen to invent some new flatbreads, so we've reassigned the CLO (Chief Letter-reply Officer) title to someone else on our team!)
But this tells you something about our company. We are a hands-on, family-run business. Sam's two sons, Tejus and Ojus, run the day-to-day operation and Jim's daughter, Jenn, designs our packaging, as well as our booths for industry tradeshows.
We act small… but we think big. We want to be the Go-To solution for foodservice operators who need tasty, healthy, authentic flatbreads; we also want to produce the flatbread that families put on their breakfast, lunch or dinner table, or which they serve to guests.
We believe consumers are bored with white bread and bagels. We believe that it is time to bring to market a line of tasty, innovative, authentic flatbreads – and we like to think that International Fabulous Flats™ is doing just that in an original, unboring way.
