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It was a fun year.

For one thing, we sent a record number of snacks to thousands of customers. 72,602 healthy snacks to be exact.

To give a bit of context about where all those snacks went, we want to (very) briefly recount how we got here. As Maya Angelou said, “You can’t really know where you are going until you know where you have been.”

So let’s go back to where we’ve been—to our first snack.

Today, we’re combining our favorite time of year with our favorite type of newsletter. We’re rolling out a new fall-themed snack to add something tasty to our foliage, football, friends and family.

Those who have tried our first snack from San Francisco-based Sweet Nothings can attest to its deliciousness. We wrote before about the story of founder Beth Porter and the company’s humble beginnings. By the way, in addition to its packaged snacks, we highly recommend Sweet Nothings’ “spoonable smoothies.”

The new Apple Cinnamon Peanut Butter Bites combine flax, oat, and cinnamon to create one of the tastiest possible fall combos, and also one of the healthiest.

Ah, Miami. Magic City.

Art Deco, South Beach, and, Pitbull. It’s the home of sunscreen, the only major American city founded by a woman, and city that that “keeps the roof blazin,” per Big Wilie Style.

It’s also a healthy city. In fact, MindBody ranked it the second-healthiest city in the country this year. Part of the reason for that is the plethora of health-focused eateries like Pura Vida, Planta Queen, and, for those willing to dish out some serious dough, Michelin-starred sushi spot Azabu.

But the airport is another story altogether. Just like in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco, good options in the city do not translate to the terminals. Luckily, we’ve taken the guesswork out with this helpful guide.

“An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” We actually prefer the original Welsh variation of this common saying, “Eat an apple on going to bed and you’ll keep the doctor from earning his bread.”

In either version, that axiom certainly carries some wisdom.

Let’s start with the science. Spanish researchers recently reviewed the available science on the impact of apple consumption on health and found that eating more apples was associated with lower inflammation, lower cholesterol, better blood flow and longer lives.

Snackers—

We spend lots of time energy focused on what we put into our bodies. While we’re busy improving our eating and nutrition, let’s not forget to divert some attention to how we move those bodies, especially while on the go.

Whether flying, driving, working remotely or collaborating in an office, most of us have experienced busy days when the time or energy needed for a workout just isn’t available. We might know that exercise could give both energy and subsequent productivity a boost. Still, it’s common for a day to slip by without even a 10-minute row, a half hour vinyasa yoga practice, or a few strength training circuits.

So therein lies the challenge: how to work physical movement into a day packed with commitments, responsibilities, and stationary adventures on a screen.

We approach this like any other challenge—accepted. Here are three ways we like to keep moving.

One way we help people eat healthier on the go is by sending snacks directly to their homes. Our customers choose this convenient option when they want snacks for a long trek across Portugal, are preparing for a long month of flying, or to upgrade their family’s snack drawer.

Another way we serve people is through businesses, which give or sell snacks to employees and customers. We’ve told you in the past about wonderful partnerships with great companies like Sheltair Aviation, Republic Airlines, and other fitness studios and company offices. 

Today, we’re excited about some new partnerships that have sprung up over the last few months. Fair warning—while this update is for everyone, admission to these companies is pretty darn exclusive. 

We frikin’ love Seattle.

From Pike Place Market to the original Starbucks, from the Space Needle to the Great Wheel, and from Gas Works Park to Bainbridge Island, it’s hard to get bored, even when it’s raining, which is usually 150 days or more each year.

Unfortunately, we can’t promise that moving to Seattle to start life over with your son will cause insomnia, or that Meg Ryan will hear your call into a radio station and then meet you in the Empire State Building to fall in love with you. However, we can promise that when visiting Emerald City, there are plenty of healthy eating options.

It might surprise you that Seattle ranked No. 2 on WalletHub’s list of the healthiest cities in the country, behind only San Francisco. For anyone familiar with the City of Flowers, that ranking checks out. Great salads at Evergreens and locally-sourced dinners at Local360 are just the start. As the motto of Portage Bay Café commands us, “Eat like you give a damn.

As frequent travelers know well—and as we’ve detailed in earlier editions of our Airport Survival Guide in cities like Los Angeles, Denver, and San Francisco—a healthy city does not predict a healthy airport.

Today, we bring you the story behind our newest snack, Oatmeal Raisin Peanut Butter Bites.

It started when entrepreneur Beth Porter’s seven year old daughter went vegetarian. Beth had a hard time finding healthy snacks and foods for her.

“I searched far and wide for snacks for our family that were healthy, convenient, and tasty but they just didn't exist,” Beth said. “So I rolled up my sleeves and got busy in my kitchen.”

She couldn’t find healthy, convenient snacks, so she made them. How airfare is that?!

Viva Las Vegas. It’s a great town for a friends reunion, for a shotgun wedding, or for losing hundreds of dollars in seconds. The sportsbooks, the steaks, the shows, the clubs, the 2 p.m. pool parties, and the 2 a.m. poker tables. It seems like every great chef has a restaurant, every great comedian plays a show, and every great buffet-goer can pay $68 dollars for mediocre food.

As Frank put it, it’s “a love-you town, and a shove-you-down and push-you-'round town.”

For all the things available in Sin City, it seems one of the hardest to find is a healthy meal, unless there’s time for a scavenger hunt.

There are a few great spots, like regional chain Flower Child or PublicUs Cafe for great coffee, some healthy options, and a nice place to work. On the Vegas strip, we opt for our classic Mexican and Mediterranean (M&M) option at Chipotle, or maybe TrueFood Kitchen in Caesar’s Palace. 

Like other installments of our Airport Survival Guide, the healthy landscape is even worse at the airport. Fear not—we’re here again to save the day, just like we’ve done at LAX, BOS, LGA, ATL, ORD, MCO, CHS, DEN, and SFO.

To be honest, LAS is as bad as we’ve seen, so keep the M&M options handy to rely on their array of beans and veggies. Or bring some healthy snacks, of course. 

Obviously, we’re all about the real-food, snack game. But health doesn’t stop at what we eat.

Take this common business travel experience as a hypothetical example. Eat some healthy snacks on the plane, then sit in a chair for 16 hours, slam back a few beers at happy hour, barely sleep in an uncomfortable hotel bed, and hop a flight back home early enough for tomorrow’s workday to begin.

We’ve tried that before, as have many of you, and the verdict remains the same: 0/10. Do not recommend. Two unhealthy thumbs down.

To truly maintain health on the move and do our best work, it all matters—diet, sleep, movement, and, of course, supreme mental oneness with the universe. Ohhhmmm.

In this article, we offer up some helpful hotel room hacks to ensure good sleep, prime fitness, and universal equanimity.

Years before Matt Weiss started his own snack brand, he spent a lot of time with his great grandmother.

Helen owned a natural food store in Michigan—as Matt tells it—“before kale was cool.” She promoted whole-food eating and limited food waste, two ideas that remained in Matt’s mind decades later when he started RIND, a dehydrated fruit snack company with the tagline, “keep it real, eat the peel.”

Like many other founders whose snacks grace the airfare marketplace—including Ashley Stevens from Earthy Krunchy Snacks and or Kate Flynn from Sun & Swell—Matt started his career in the corporate world. 

After working in the finance arena in New York City for 20 years, Matt began scratching his entrepreneurial itch, spending time on his young snack company as a side hustle.

One day, his wife, a practical partner and seasoned attorney, came to see him operate at a tradeshow and said, “You’ve got to do this.”

“The brand was at a point that was very exciting, there was traction in the market, and I would have regretted it if I didn’t take my shot,” Matt told podcaster and marketing expert Kristi Bridges.

And so, he took it.

Each of our snack choices is based on the type of snacker we are. What purpose is the snack serving?

To illustrate our point, let’s imagine purchasing a car.

If the car will primarily serve to get from point A to point B, any dependable vehicle will suffice. A Hyundai and a Bugatti will both meet the low threshold for “good enough.”

Instead, say we’re in a more realistic situation and want to get from place to place and also want to do so in style. Here, we may want a Porsche 911 Turbo instead of a used station wagon—we’re wealthy in this example. 💰

Now let’s add a third purpose—we want to commute, to look good, and to minimize our impact on the environment. In this case, we might end up with a Tesla.

This same framework applies to the three primary snack-a-gories. In addition to the baseline requirements of convenience and hunger satisfaction—which apply to all snacks—each snack category serves a specific set of needs.

Mango is the fifth most popular fruit in the world. It’s actually sixth if we count tomatoes, but that’s just nerdy. Nearly half of the 40 million tons produced worldwide every year come from India.  Bangladesh, not to be outdone, made the mango tree its national tree, so the award for top mango-loving nation isn’t quite settled.

The American mango scene, however, isn’t quite as…sweet.

When people hear “plant-based,” they often say two things. 

First, “Ugh, I could never do that, I love cheese too much.” And then,  “But how do you get your protein?”

We can’t help the cheese lovers, but the protein query is a fair one, so we’ll answer it here. 

To be clear, we aren’t recommending you eat a diet strictly based on our snacks. Here’s a great place to reach about getting ample protein on a whole-food, plant-based diet. Today, we’ll detail how to get enough protein just from snacks in the airfare marketplace when in a pinch.

Whether building muscle or simply striving for the minimum recommended protein consumption, we’ve got you covered.

When a fellow Alaska Airlines flight attendant told Matthew Merrill she was planning to trek the 150-mile Camino Portugues along the Iberian Peninsula, he was immediately intrigued. This seemed like a bucket list adventure, and before long, the two were planning the adventure together.

We admire Matthew’s intrepid pursuit of this terrific journey, and are grateful to have him as a loyal airfare customer. It makes us proud that our snacks helped him enjoy the adventure of a lifetime.

Check out our full Q&A below, and send us stories of your own snack-laden adventures.

You’re in a rush.

The next meeting starts in 30 minutes. It’s a quick drive away, leaving just enough time to grab a snack. Busy and running on only coffee and a banana, midday hunger is slowly taking hold. 

Your heart sinks realizing you’ve finished everything in your airfare shipment this month—those snacks are just too damn tasty. Thankfully, there’s a Whole Foods along the route, the perfect five-minute stop to grab a bar, and maybe something else. 

As you speed walk through the automatic doors and head for the snack aisle, the mission is clear: pick quickly without sacrificing health. Thankfully, you know the four-step, no-fail guide to choosing the right snack every time.

Snackers shopping in the airfare marketplace know they’re getting a rare combination: snacks that are healthy and delicious.

Today, we’ll discuss the specifics of how we make that evaluation and apply clear criteria to build the healthiest snack marketplace in the country.

We wrote in the past about what “actually healthy” means and why we stick to it. To summarize, it is our best interpretation of the combined findings from organizations like the World Health Organization, the American Dietetics Association, and other credible health groups that comb through the best existing science on healthy diets.

That led us to the following criteria:

It’s hard to be healthy while on the move.

For consultants on a cross-country redeye, pilots on a four-day trip, or parents taking three fidgety monsters to visit their grandparents in the Poconos, it’s easy to forget about self care.

The good news is that we can do something about it.

There are fundamental principles, accumulated over the course of a decade, that we focus on in order to maintain a fun, busy, active life, without sacrificing wellbeing.

Of course, like the habits mentioned in Stephen Covey’s classic book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, some take longer than others to get right. 

We’re back, this time with another dorky dose of nutritional know-how.

Today we’ll dive into elements of a healthy life that Americans—and millions of people in developed countries around the world—are deficient in.

We’ll start with the three things we could all use more of, how that impacts our health, and the best ways to get ourselves into the green.

And what could make us want to improve our healthy more than a gym towel and dumbbells our salad like the terrific stock photo above?

It’s our favorite type of announcement…we’ve got yet another new snack in the house.

In addition to the usual deliciousness we all expect, this one has a little caffeinated kick with its crunch for those of us who happen to skip our morning joe.

We’re proud to introduce another great brand from the Lone Star State—Wildway, which makes tasty grain-free granola and was started by an entrepreneur with a dream.

The last few months have been hard. 

We’ve been going about our days, sitting in the car or in the flight deck, working an office, coffee shop, train, or airport, or hiking a winding, mountain trail, and repeatedly thinking: 

“Mary’s—where did you go? I’m sitting here, eating the peanut butter straight from the packet without a healthy cracker to spread it on.” 

Oh, that was just us? 

When Zach and Val Fishbain started making homemade peanut butter in 2013, it was simply to give to friends and family members at their wedding.

Val had received a Vitamix blender as a bridal shower gift, and she used it to make soups and smoothies, each time excited to use her new toy. Not long after, Zach came home with store-bought peanut butter, and she had an idea.

“She would look at the back of the ingredient deck and just be like, ‘What are you eating? Why are you eating hydrogenated or palm oil? Why are you eating this type of sugar or this type of ingredient?” Zach said.

Val thought she could do better, so she got to grinding some peanuts.

Several weeks, many instances of an overheated blender, and 150 mason jars later, the couple had the adorable, homemade nut butter wedding giveaway ready.

"It was a very California do-it-yourself wedding,” Val told The New York Times. “Shoes were optional.”

At the time, the young couple had no ambitions of starting what would eventually become a healthy snack company. Zach was involved with several entrepreneurial projects, and Val loved her career doing social work. But the response from wedding guests to the homemade nut butter was so positive, the couple felt compelled to give it a try.

Orlando—equally enjoyed by 6-year-old girls and 44-year-old mustached salesmen. From Mickey Mouse suits to suit-and-tie conventions, O-Town’s got goin on.

This year, it was also home to the National Business Aviation Association’s Business Aviation Conference & Exhibition, one of the largest private aviation conferences in the world. One of the 1,000 companies in attendance was yours truly, represented by its underdressed cofounders. We tried to add some “coolness” with t-shirts and jeans while nearly everyone else sweated in blazers, slacks, and dresses.

Orlando isn’t exactly known as a “health city.” Yet, like most American destinations, the major airport—Orlando International (MCO)—has healthy options if you know where to look. Again, we’ve done the hard work of finding the healthiest options, just as in our other Airport Survival Guide entries: Los Angeles, Chicago O’Hare, New York LaGuardia, Atlanta, San Francisco, Charleston, Denver, and Boston.

We usually break down the scene by terminal, but MCO has a unique layout, so we’ll give you options by both terminal and gate number.

Snacking friends—

We’re obviously all about snacks, though that’s usually when we are on the go, movin’ and groovin’, shakin’ and bakin’. We also love cooking at home, especially at the end of a productive day when the cold evening sets in.

This week, we bring our attention to three great, plant-based, whole-food recipes for a weekend when much of the country is blanketed in a winter freeze.

Stay warm, stay healthy, and enjoy.

By now, we’ve made it clear that we’re all about whole, real, plant foods like fruit, veggies, beans, nuts, and spices. That’s it. No added sugars, sweeteners, oils, or other junk.

But the ingredient-reading sticklers out there may have noticed something curious.

One example is Geremy’s brother-in-law, a chef in Washington, D.C.. On a recent visit to celebrate a new baby in the family (welcome, Emmer Smith!), Geremy was asked about this ingredient inconsistency.

Why, Chef Cable asked, is their an ingredient in airfare snacks that is not a whole, real, plant food?

Yes, chef was asking about salt. And it’s a fair question we want to address.

As any chef knows, although salt is found on our spice racks and is considered a “seasoning,” it isn’t a spice at all—it’s a rock. By definition, a spice is a “vegetable substance,” but salt is a mineral made of the naturally-occurring chemicals sodium and chloride jammed together.

Today we’ll explain the health implications of salt and why we allow it in our snacks.

On any hot afternoon in Afghanistan—and in many countries along route of the ancient Silk Road—it’s typical to find residents and travelers resting and enjoying tea with dried fruits and nuts. When Patrick Johnson and Raffi Vartanian experienced this themselves, it sparked the idea that led to our newest new snack partner, Ziba Foods.

Patrick and Raffi found the experience rewarding and the snacks both healthy and tasty, so they set out on a mission to bring these unique tastes to America. 

“We believe that healthy snacks should be delicious, and that delicious snacks can be good for your health,” they said, echoing our own perspective.

Ziba means "beautiful" in Farsi, And like our other terrific partners in the airfare marketplace, Ziba stands for more than simply selling healthy snacks. 

The gift-giving, buying-things-for-yourself, thinking-about-getting-back-into-shape-sometime-in-January season is upon us. To help get into the spirit, today we bring you 10 “gadgets” that we, our customers, and various health and travel experts have found most useful to maintain health and good habits on the move.

Let’s jump in.

Which matters more—the amount of calories we eat or the quality of those calories?

Diet gurus often try to trick us by positioning this question as an either-or choice. But don’t buy into that.

The answer is both.

Many of the most respected health organizations around the world agree on the simple advice to eat more fruits and vegetables. Study findings consistently show that adding fruits and vegetables to our diets has a number of health benefits and generally contributes to a longer, healthier life. 

Interestingly, some specific fruits and vegetables stand above the rest. For fruit, the top candidate is somewhere in the berry category.

We won’t be definition-sticklers and include the “technically berries” like coffee and avocado. Today, we’re talking about the standard berries: blue, black, straw, and rasp, and some of the more exotic options like goji and goose. 

Our mission is to make it easier to eat healthy on the go. Thanks to you, we’ve been able to help a growing number of people over the past three years.

When we started airfare’s journey in 2019, we shipped a few hundred snacks. Not necessarily earth-shattering, but a good start.

Since then—again, because of you—we’ve grown considerably. This year, we sent out 39,467 snacks— not that we’re counting.

Is that a lot? We’re not sure. We do know that it’s thousands of pounds of fruits, veggies, nuts and seeds…a whole lot bunch of fiber.

One thing that makes healthy eating hard—especially on the go—is the trade-offs.

As we’ve worked hard to grow airfare, we’ve learned about the continuous stream of small tasks that are neither fun nor glamorous.

Tax paperwork, state permits, hours on the phone with UPS, or helping a customer having trouble with the website while he explains the bowel-related impacts of his new high-fiber snack diet. These are not part of the dream life of a high-flying entrepreneur.

On the flip side, there are times when it’s pure bliss, like attending Natural Products Expo West in Anaheim, Calif. last week. For a hardcore snack geek, it’s heaven.

What do we do when things get hard? How do we stay inspired?

Many of us are doing great things while we’re snacking. We’re operating machines that fly more than 500 miles per hour. We’re managing teams of hundreds of people and overseeing decisions with millions of dollars on the line. And we’re accomplishing great feats while we’re raising families, staying fit, and maintaining social connections.

We often write about the importance of healthy eating, but ultimately, our focus on building airfare is much larger. We believe healthy eating leads to healthy minds, long lives, and, of course, buns of steel. All of which are good for ourselves, our community, and our world.

That all sounds nice. But, back to our original question: what keeps us inspired when things get difficult?

One place we find inspiration is in boos. Their striking snippets of wisdom and nuggets of insight help us see further, dream bigger, and hope longer. For a little Friday pick-me-up, here are 25 of our favorite quotes that keep us motivated.

Many of us have flown with Republic Airlines before—it is one of the largest regional airlines in the country, operating 200 planes and flying nearly 1,000 flights every day.

Behind the scenes of the Indianapolis-based company is a consistent focus on the health of its employees.

The prevalence of employee wellness programs have increased over the last decade. But while many companies merely talk the talk about employee wellness, we’ve been impressed at Republic backing up its words with action. 

We hope you’re having a lovely start to a healthy new year.

On our side, we’ve been up to our usual antics of slingin’ snacks and making sure every Tom, Dick, Harry, Tanya, Daisy and Helena have healthy snacking options on the go.

We’ve also made some exciting website changes, broken ground on new partnerships, and added new snacks to the marketplace.

We’ll be in Nashville at the National Business Aviation Association’s Schedulers and Dispatchers event next week repping the brand, handing out snacks, and honky-tonkin'.

Here's is a roundup of what we’ve been up to. We’d love to hear the news from your neck of the woods, so please send us any updates you care to share.

Many of our loyal customers know about the sweet, nutty, fruity, chocolatey goodness of the bars from Austin’s Bearded Brothers. We covered the actual brothers that started the Texas-based snack maker here.

Like many great boutique snack companies, Bearded Brothers changes its lineup based on customer tastes, ingredient costs, and other factors. Flavors come and go, like all good things in life.

And that’s exactly what’s happening with the Chocolate Coconut and Toasted Sesame flavors, both beloved options that spent nearly a year in the airfare marketplace. As the old Scottish saying goes, “Out with the old and in with the new.”

Happy Friday, snackers.

We’ve talked about the health of nuts in general—and almonds specifically—in the past. We noted that their high fiber and monounsaturated fat content, antioxidant capacity, and other benefits make them very healthy choices.

But then there’s the peanut, which isn’t even a tree nut at all, but a legume. Depending which InstaTV channel is on, you might hear someone belittling the mighty peanut for reasons ranging from “anti-nutrients” to allergies to inflammation.

Instead of blindly trusting the latest narrative, let’s take a close look at what the science says.

There’s nothing quite like Big D.

Jerry Jones, Mark Cuban and Bonnie and Clyde. Dallas is the home of great inventions like the frozen margarita machine, the first National Football League cheerleading squad, and one of the staples of unhealthy American snacking, 7-Eleven. Oddly, Dallas is also the home of the largest Arts District in the country.

There are plenty of great reasons to visit Dallas, but eating healthy isn’t one of them. Besides chains like Sweetgreen or rare gems like the fantastic Tribal All Day Café, the city stays squarely in the confines of barbeque, Tex-Mex, and anything fried or refried.

The city’s major airport is predictably even worse. In fact, DFW is a venerable disaster.

It would take a detective to ferret out the few healthy options. Luckily, we brought our trench coats, notepads and magnifying glasses down to the Jumbo State, and we are on the case.

On a day when many of us will be enjoying the Super Bowl surrounded by greasy food options, we’re delving into a…slippery question.

Getting into the health of oil is slimy for several reasons. First, we have to narrow it down.

Coconut and palm oils, for instance, have lots of saturated fat, while olive oil has relatively little. Since limiting saturated fat intake is recommended by most respected health organizations around the world, we’ll start by advising limited coconut oil.

The quantity and use of oils also makes a significant difference. Adding a tablespoon of fresh oil to a cold salad is different than frying a vat to deep fry peanuts.

Lastly, as our favorite shell with shoes on would ask: “compared to what?” Olive oil is certainly healthier than animal lard, but it can’t hold an oily candle to an avocado.

All told, the answer to “is oil healthy?” is a clear, unsatisfying “it depends.” The firmest conclusion we can make is that oils are healthier than some alternatives.

Most of our customers and fans have likely noticed a pattern in our snack marketplace: they’ve never heard of most of the brands.

There’s a reason for that. And it’s not that we hate big companies.

It’s also not that large corporations never make #actuallyhealthy products. It’s just…rare. According to one study, at least 70% are unhealthy.

There are reasons for this. It’s cheaper to use sweeteners, oils, and other additives rather than real-food ingredients like, say, blueberries. These additives also extend shelf lives of foods, making them more profitable to stock in stores. Supposedly, they also improve taste, though we’d prefer a real blueberry any day. For an interesting deep-dive on this topic, read Sugar, Salt, Fat, which posits that we’ve been trained to prefer these artificial tastes.

Thankfully, boutique, smaller businesses don’t grapple with the same problems as their corporate overlords.

Today, let’s do a little thought experiment. Imagine facing a day ahead that is non-stop. It’s just one of those on-the-move, productive or adventurous days jammed with work, play, and travel.

Maybe it’s the 15-hour coastal drive from Los Angeles to Portland, or maybe it’s an East Coast long-haul from Washington, D.C. to Miami. Maybe it’s a two-flight situation with a three-hour sit in between. Or maybe it’s just an important day at the office packed with meetings, calls, a happy hour, and a client event.

One clear commonality across these different days is that the food choices might be tasty, but they likely won’t be healthy. And of course, the time to sit and eat will be scarce.

Through our snacking journey building airfare, we’ve learned how to power through days like these with taste, variety, and health.

For funsies, today we’re winding through a hypothetical 15-hour road trip up the left coast that will allow us to imagine many of things we love—snacks, mountains, sea, and open road.

Along the way, here’s how we would snack to stay feeling at our best.

Even for those of us living the quintessential airfare lifestyle—on the go, building new things, and pursuing adventure—there’s always a time when we regroup and reroot at home.

When we’re not on the move, we remain diligent about our health, especially what we eat. Unfortunately, the problem we encounter at the airport persists in grocery story aisles: products that claim to be healthy often are not.

To steer us in the right direction, here are three essential groceries that make the grade.

Healthy shopping and happy snacking.

At airfare, we’re all about the beans. Just like the World Health Organization and the American Diabetes Association, we see beans as among the healthiest foods available. That’s why we get irrationally excited when we come across a bean-focused snack without any added junk.

Today, we’re introducing another new snack to our growing assortment, and another that’s loaded with legumes. Like most of our other incredible snack partners, the story of today’s new snacks begins with their founders.

For years, Caroline Israel struggled with her health, weight, and food addiction. She tried numerous remedies including psychotherapy, Overeaters Anonymous, hypnosis, and various medications. No matter what she tried, she still found herself binging on bread, cheese, and sweets.

Then she came across the book that changed her life: Eat to Live by Dr. Joel Fuhrman. The book focuses on a concept called nutrient density. “As your level of micronutrients increases—by consuming greater amounts of high-nutrient foods—your appetite will naturally decrease,” Dr. Fuhrman writes.

That’s exactly what happened for Caroline. After about a year and half heeding the book’s advice and consistently adding higher-nutrient foods to her diet, her cravings started to dissipate.

Say what you want about the City by the Bay—San Francisco knows food.

No matter the type of cuisine, the level of service, the price or the ambiance, the Golden Gate City has it covered…healthy food included.

We like to hit up Blue Barn, Wildseed, Kitava, and Nourish Café. But once we head south in San Mateo County toward San Francisco International Airport (SFO), things get rough.

Let us be clear— SFO might be our favorite airport in the country. Aside from the six-hour walk to the rideshare pickup area, it’s a progressive, user-friendly haven. Right on brand with the technology-forward city it calls home, SFO has everything from ubiquitous water bottle filling stations, all-electric bathrooms, oodles of power outlets for all the techbros, lactation stations, interactive kid zones, and even some unique outdoor spaces.

On the flip side, the healthy food options are…underwhelming.

That’s where airfare has your back. We’ve scoured the SFO terminals to determine the best options, emergency fallbacks, coffee secrets, and more. Whether arriving to or departing from the 4-1-5, this guide will ensure you’re well-nourished and ready to take on the day.

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If there are two things our team likes, they are healthy snacks and great beards.

That’s why when cofounder Justin walked into the Arlo Hotel in New York City’s NoMad neighborhood in 2017, he was overwhelmed with rapture. A snack bar made of real food and no added junk?! Could it be so? The image of two bros with beards on the packaging sent him over the edge.

Justin promptly purchased the bar from the hotel café, took a bite, and the love affair was locked in. “This must be one of the healthiest, best tasting bars in existence!” he shouted to a lobby full of strangers who ignored him. He knew he’d found something special.

Today we’re bringing that snack to you. Introducing Bearded Brothers: one of the best-tasting, healthiest and uniquely flavored selection of snacking bars in the country. The Bearded team makes all sorts of fun flavors, three of which we’re adding to our growing airfare snack assortment.

Before we get to the goods, let’s learn more about this company and its beginnings, shall we? Strap in, team—we’re taking a flight down to Austin, Tex.

This week, we’re in Charleston, the Holy City. Sun and sand, shrimp and grits. A great town for hush puppies, cornbread and she-crab soup, but it’s not necessarily the first city that comes to mind when we think of healthy eats.

However, we’ve recently seen some movement in a more nutritious direction. At a conference for female pilots this week hosted by The Ninety-Nines, our team was fortunate to find a great little spot called Basic Kitchen, a plant-forward take on a lively, American gastropub. Other health-focused spots dot Chucktown’s map, like Gnome Café, Rush Bowls, Clean Juice and Verde.

Just like in other cities we’ve covered, the airport is usually where good nutrition stops, and Charleston International (CHS) is no exception. In fact, of all the Airport Survival Guide entries, this might be the most limited in terms of both healthy options…and food options in general.

We’ve put together the healthiest places to eat in the busiest airports around the country (Los Angeles International, Chicago O’Hare, Atlanta Hartsfield, Denver International, LaGuardia) to help snackless and vulnerable fliers navigate these calorie-rich, nutrient-poor travel hubs. And during our time at CHS, we had to work extra hard to dig up some healthy options.

Every month, there are more places to get airfare’s healthy snacks besides a subscription or order from our website. In July, we detailed our partnership with fixed-base operator (FBO) Sheltair to offer our snacks in many of its locations around the country.

As a refresher, FBOs are small airports for private jets, complete with landing strips, hangars, and often very nice “terminals” akin to comfortable hotel lobbies. Continuing our mission to make healthy snacking everywhere, today we’re flying west. So grab a stylish ski suit, call a celebrity friend, and snag a $240 lift ticket (yes, that’s for one day), because we’re headed to another one of the consistently top ranked FBOs in the country: the Vail Valley Jet Center (VVJC).

Vail, Colo. is not just for the rich and famous—it’s home to a substantial number of renowned businesses, serves as a primary training ground for the U.S. National Guard, and now—most importantly—has the best healthy snacks in the game.

We were lucky to tour the VVJC facility with Dani and Jessica—caring and knowledgeable members of the Vail Valley team with more than 30 years of customer service experience combined. We felt the hospitality first-hand, though we surely weren’t the first ones to notice. In 2021, VVJC was purchased by Signature Aviation, one of the largest FBO chains in the world.

Much of the value of that purchase likely came from the rich history of the VVJC.

When Ganesh Nair started selling cashews in California in 2014, he wasn’t the first in his family to do so. The Nairs had been in the cashew business for more than 85 years. But Ganesh brought something unique to the family trade, and his ingenuity ultimately resulted in one of our favorite new snacks, Karma Nuts.

For starters, Ganesh has a Master’s Degree in Health Science and Technology from airfare’s smarter neighbor in Cambridge, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Add in Ganesh’s two decades treating diabetes in healthcare facilities, and it’s clear: this man knows about health.

All that knowledge taught him quite a bit about the health benefits of cashews. As many loyal airfare snackers already know, nuts in general are among the healthiest foods we can eat. A PREDIMED study showed that eating a handful of mixed nuts per day can cut the risk of stroke in half. Eating nuts has also been linked to decreased cancer proliferation, lower cholesterol and heart disease, and numerous other benefits. Kind of nutty to think about.

And cashews have some specific upsides. First, lowering blood pressure, which could help the more than 1 billion adults worldwide with hypertension. Second, cashews are good source of monounsaturated fats, protein, copper, and a handful of other vitamins and minerals.

We made a mistake.

As you know, our mission is to make it easier to eat healthy while on the go. At the core of that mission is a promise about the health and quality of our snacks. If we cannot maintain a high level of both, we have nothing.

To ensure those high standards, we draw lines—criteria that all snacks must meet. No snack can have added sugar, sweetener or oil, and every snack must be gluten-free and made from only real, whole food, plant-based ingredients. We continue to stand by those promises.

In a few instances, we overlooked an ingredient, and we’re writing this to be clear that:

1. We’re embarrassed by this miss.
2. We’re making a change.
3. We ask for your forgiveness.
4. We won’t let it happen again.

Some ingredients in four snacks in our growing assortment do not match the health criteria above. We noticed this a few months after purchasing the snacks, and we hesitated to take action. We waited because customers liked the snacks, and the ingredient discrepancies seemed minor. That was a mistake.

We’re now choosing to stick to our promises. The unfortunate result is that we are removing these four snacks from our marketplace.

As you know, all of us at airfare are about health before anything. We find that ensuring our own health—whether via adequate sleep, regular exercise, or healthy eating—makes us better equipped to do the things we care about with those we love.

This week, we’ve compiled some of our favorite sources of healthy knowledge. Below, we highlight five experts in different health-related fields, each with a link to a specific topic or recent article.

So as we head into Labor Day weekend, soak in these bits of health knowledge in your downtime. Or just turn your late summer cookout into a science reading club and have as much fun as the smiling group in this stock image. 👆🏻

We can barely contain our excitement.

Our whole team has been working on today’s announcement for months, and we’re excited to hear your response. Allow us to introduce you to the totally revamped airfare website.

We made big changes to the site so it better serves airfare’s purpose: to make it easier to eat healthy on the go. We want to make it simple to find and get the best selection of #actuallyhealthy, delicious, plant-based snacks, all in one place. The old site was good enough; the new site puts it to shame.

There’s an odd problem with eating fruit. Although nearly every health organization in the world—including the World Health Organization—recommends eating more fruit, there is a perception that it’s healthier to eat less.

With the popularity of low-carb, low-sugar, higher-fat diets, a common idea is that all carb intake—including fruit consumption—makes us fat. If that’s true about apples and berries, the thinking goes, then it certainly stands for the mighty date, which is about 70 percent sugar.

Despite the buzz around fad diets, science—broad reviews and meta-analyses of the best studies that exist on the topic—conclude the opposite. Researchers consistently advise more fruit in our diets. If anything, fruit consumption—sugar-laden as it is—leads to smaller tummies and lower incidence of diabetes, as we’ve covered before. Although we should avoid sugar in packets, juices, or honey jars, when it comes in the form of a whole fruit, it impacts the body differently. This includes the types of fruit found in airfare snacks—unsweetened, unoiled, dried fruit.

But does this science stand true for dates, the fruit once source called “bags of sugar?”

Ahh, Denver. Beards, IPAs, and snow-capped mountains in the distance. A great city, though as Jeff Daniels’ Harry Dunn said, “I thought the Rocky Mountains would be a little rockier than this.”

For Denver’s notoriously “outdoorsy” culture, we’ve found there to be fewer #actuallyhealthy food options than we expected—it’s a lot of burgers and microbrews, and not a ton of greens.

For those who know where to look, there are plenty of gems. But once you leave the city limits and head to Denver International Airport (DIA), you’ll be in familiar territory, following the unhealthy pattern of most large airports like Los Angeles International and LaGuardia. Fast food, expensive junk, and limited options.

Lucky for you, airfare, yet again, has your back. We picked out the DIA highlights so you can DIY health. 🙄

Ahh, Boston, a wicked smaht city and home of the most brilliant janitor ever to live. Beyond its world-class universities and hospitals, biotech and fintech centers of excellence, and deep-running fibers of American history, it’s also home to the legendary snack kingdom airfare calls home. Boston holds such intellectual grandeur that it was once called The Athens of America, which is still evident today in the genius of smaht pahk.

But despite the 44 institutions of higher education in the Boston metro area, the city is fairly dumb when it comes to healthy food options.

Any city an #actuallyhealthy snack company calls home should be…#actuallyhealthy itself, but not so in Boston’s case. Don’t be fooled by the nickname Beantown and the city’s rich historical ties to the the fibrous super-plant.

In fairness, there are some definite gems around The City on a Hill, like Root, Live Alive Café, True Bistro and Plant Pub (shoutout to airfare friend Pat McAuley). But the professional sports prowess in Title Town doesn’t translate into it being a health haven.

Like in other cities, food options get progressively worse as we close in on the major airport (see LAX, ORD, DEN, LGA, and ATL). Boston Logan International Airport is no exception.

Since our team is in and out of Logan like it’s their job to spread snacks like magical fairy dust (it is), we’ve done the work of unearthing the go-to stops at BOS.

This is how to survive when flying through Beantown.

The team at Jonesbar—one of our snack partners based in New Jersey—made an exciting announcement: they’re bringing back a limited batch of their fantastic Banana Chocolate Chip Bars. We jumped on the news immediately, knowing how much the airfare community loves that flavor.

We’re sharing this limited, first-come, first-serve supply with you.

One of our favorite parts of running airfare is connecting with entrepreneurs on a like-minded mission—increasing access to snacks that are great in both taste and health. Otherwise known as #actuallyhealthy.

That mission is exactly what inspired Diane Orley to start her business—Daily Crunch Snacks.

On a life-changing trip to India some 20 years ago, Diane learned about the benefits of “sprouting” nuts. Sprouting involves soaking nuts in water and then dehydrating them. The process allows the nut spores to continue growing and changing, resulting in nuts that are more easily digestible and potentially richer in antioxidants. While the science is still unclear on any added nutritional benefits, sprouting grains and beans does seem to increase antioxidant capacity. Either way, the delicious crunch and pop of Daily Crunch’s almonds is unmistakable.

When Diane returned from India, she started experimenting. Feeling a little nutty, she tried adding clean ingredients and spices to pair the sprouted crunch with some exciting tastes. Of course, she left all the added junk aside. She was aiming for “a tasty, crunchy sprouted nut snack made with all real ingredients, no oil, and no added sugars.” That’s our kind of gal. 😉

Stacy is a private helicopter pilot, so we know she’s pretty cool right off the bat. Add celebrities and billionaires as her daily passengers, and we’ve got a certifiable badass on our hands.

But over the past few years, Stacy noticed a problem. She loved her job and lifestyle but struggled with its impact on her health and overall energy. Finding it difficult to both locate healthy options and make time to eat them, she often resorted to sneaking in a few bags of chips or a crappy sandwich.

She was looking for a better option.

Next, there’s Bunnie, a medical laboratory scientist with a different problem.

Bunnie used to be a triathlete who exercised at least six days a week. Now, a little older and with a packed schedule in the lab and training pilots (Superwoman?), Bunnie found less time in her day to stay active.

Due to these changes in lifestyle, her diet became more of a focus, yet she rarely found exciting or high-quality options at her job, at the training center, or at Costco.

She was seeking something different.

Finally, there’s Jill, who started a jet management and training facility with her husband. She’s also a dedicated mother and private pilot, so her schedule is hectic.

When she’s home, Jill sometimes makes time for a nice, long walk and a balanced breakfast. But on many days—especially if she’s flying—in her words, “All bets are off.” During her packed schedule, she finds herself eating out frequently and grabbing more on-the-go staples like wraps and chips, creating a mix she called “mostly a lot of crap.” As the training center business picked up, the same problems began appearing both in the sky and at the office.

Now turning 50, Jill lost some 25 pounds last year in an effort to keep up her energy. She started to see that weight creep back, so she looked for a more sustainable change.

Stacy, Bunnie and Jill were three women balancing busy, fulfilling lives who were all looking for an on-the-go lifeline. And that’s when they found airfare.

Chicago isn't known for being health forward. Case-in-point: deep dish pizza—really more of a cake than pie. But slowly over the last decade or so, the Second City has turned a corner.

When you’re in the "312" itself, you can now count on a healthy meal at places like Protein Bar. Which is good because between the Italian beef, hot dogs and deep dish it’s hard to leave the Third Coast without needing a triple bypass.

Unfortunately, the new health movement stops at the city limits. When you get to the nation's third-busiest airport, you'll have to look very hard to find some greens and beans. Luckily, we did the looking for you.

Without further ado, let’s get to the list. Here’s where to eat when you’re flying through Sweet Home Chicago.

“Clean eating shouldn’t be bland and boring.”

That’s a statement we wholeheartedly agree with, but those are the words of Bazaar Bars founder Eid Mostafa, a man after our own snacking hearts. Eid believes clean eating can be creative and fun if you know the right places to look.

One of the best places to look is San Diego, which is where Bazaar Bars is headquartered. At any given time, visitors might walk through the wafting pleasure of the scents of cardamom, marshmallow root, and sumac. Take it from the airfare snacking connoisseurs…Bazaar Bars make some of the most unique (and delicious) snacks around.

Last week, we went over the fiber-heavy, protein-laden, inflammation-zapping reasons why beans are #actuallyhealthy. We’ve always encouraged loading up with legumes in snacks from partners like Lupii and WellBean, and now, we’re even beanier, baby.

We’re excited to introduce two of our newest snack partners, both of whom are spreading beans faster than Jack and his notorious stalk.

Let’s dive into an often-discussed and rarely-agreed-upon topic…fruit.

On one hand, the public health recommendations on fruit are noncontroversial. Everyone from the World Health Organization to the American Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics to the British Nutrition Foundation has unanimously urged people to eat more whole fruit. The same goes for annual recommendations from public health organizations in the healthiest countries in the world, including Iceland, Japan and Australia.

Yet fruit continues to hold a definite stigma, mostly as a holdover from the low-carb craze. The predominant fear is that fruit has too much sugar, and that eating gobs of fruit will make you fat.

But is there any evidence that eating more fruit leads to larger waists?

The scenarios are almost infinite—on the move, limited flexibility, short on time, and no access to anything healthy. We’ve all experienced this on the plane and at the airport, but it extends much further than that.

It could be at a hotel or a training facility in the middle of nowhere. Maybe it’s a jam-packed day full of meetings or a long drive to a remote location. Or maybe it’s simply a day when you want to eat cleanly because, like us, you feel more productive and clearer-thinking with less in your tummy.

It’s exactly these scenarios for which you keep airfare snacks handy—when you plan to maintain energy and feel good by eating well despite difficult circumstances.

Of course, there are unplanned events too, when things change suddenly. That’s when airfare can really come in handy. It can be, as one pilot called it, your “snack insurance.”

Here are real-life examples of how our customers were saved by the snacks.

At airfare, we love beans.

We go garbanzo for them. Our favorite movie? Mr Bean. When we’re flying, we can be persuaded to take less leg room, as long as we have our legumes.

And we’re not alone. We recently heard that tennis legend Ivan Lendl loved beans so much that he legally changed his name to Ivan Lentil. 😬

But loving something doesn’t mean it’s good, with pizza and croissants serving as prime examples. Fortunately, in the case of beans, our well-being and our desire are quite well-aligned.

We’re proud and grateful to unveil a new partnership we’ve finalized with one of the most reputable companies in private aviation: Sheltair.

We paid homage to Sheltair’s intrepid leader, Lisa Holland, earlier this year, back when we began doing pop-up events selling and sampling snacks at various Sheltair locations from Fort Lauderdale, Fla. all the way to Broomfield, Colo.

We had the pleasure of spending time with the wonderful, energetic Sheltair leadership team and the hard-working staff at each location. It was quite the education, learning about the business of a fixed-base operator (FBO) and how Sheltair puts a premium on safety and serving its employees, customers, and crew.

We admire Sheltair for not only talking the talk, but also show its commitment through action, including the decision to take our partnership to the next level.

Anyone that knows airfare is aware…we’re a bunch of nuts. Because nuts—as we’ve explained here and here—are considered by nearly every accredited health organization to be both beneficial to overall health and widely underconsumed: fewer than 10% of Americans are regular consumers of any tree nuts.

Some examples: one review showed that although nuts are high in calories and fat, regular nut consumers do not gain weight. On the contrary, most people who add nuts to their diet lose weight and body fat. Another review of the best studies available showed the same outcomes from increased nut consumption related to body weight and also found benefits across the board, from heart health to inflammation.

Today’s focus, ironically, isn’t even a nut. We’re talkin’ almonds.

It turns out the almonds we eat are actually the seeds of the almond tree and are wrapped in…a fruit. 🤯 Nuts or not, the real questions are, what do almonds do for us, and do they have any downsides?

Last week, we told you about the specific health benefits of almonds, and this week, we’ll stay on the topic and introduce our newest snack—almonds with a whole new twist. These aren’t the boring raw almonds filling the racks at Hudson News. Instead, these sensational seeds (almonds aren’t nuts, remember?) pack a punch, and they do it with a healthy flair.

See, our primary job at airfare HQ is deciding on our first principles. We came up with a science-based definition of what it means to be #actuallyhealthy, deciding on Day One to present only snacks that a) pass the strictest health scrutiny and b) taste really good.

No matter how healthy something is, if it tastes like cardboard, we’ll pass. Similarly, no matter how delicious a snack may be, only unsweetened, unoiled, gluten-free plant ingredients are inside, or we’re out. The Snickers Ice Cream Bar may be one of the great-tasting innovations of the twentieth century, but it isn’t airfare material.

That’s why we get so excited when we find our way to a snack that achieves both health and taste with flying colors.

airfare followers who have been on board for a while likely know why we exist: to make it easier to eat healthy on the go. We’ve scoured North America to find the best-tasting #actuallyhealthy snacks in existence, gathered them under one roof, and simplified automating good nutrition for people on the move.

With that mission and 60 snack options to choose from, it’s clear that the nexus of several hard-to-find benefits keeps our members coming back every month: health, convenience, taste, and variety.

The problem is obvious: life on the go means limited choices. 

Less time, less space, less quality food, less stability. As Karma, a commercial flight attendant put it, “you basically lose all sense of balance and routine.”

This is especially true as a pilot, flight attendant or "In The Air"-style George Clooney-esque business traveler (unless, of course, you are Clooney himself, who likely has ample options).

Don't get us wrong—there's upside. Flying through the skies, traveling the world, meeting interesting people, seeing interesting places. US News even ranked pilot as number 26 out of the top 100 “Best Jobs of 2021.”

But it’s a trade-off. 

This week, we’re giving you a break from our top-notch writing, and instead pointing to a few people already publishing helpful content about what we live for—making it easier to be healthy on the go. These trusted sources are airfare customers or friends of our team, and their expertise is the world of fitness.

If these fitness freaks don’t motivate you, then….at least you’ve got #actuallyhealthy snacks, right? Now go do some wall sits and elbow planks.

There will inevitably be times when you don’t have your airfare snacks handy.

It could be an unexpected trip, or all the snacks are already eaten. Or maybe you’re such an angel that you gifted the snack pouch to your partner, a pilot who is off flying their line, leaving you to fend for yourself on a road trip.

Whatever the reason, you need an answer to the burning question: how can I eat #actuallyhealthy and maintain health and energy when stranded snackless?

We’ve previously shared the answer for various situations, like at major airports and at Starbucks, but out and about, here’s how to save yourself from snacking purgatory.

We like to be in the middle of the action—preferably with snacks in hand—especially when it’s in support of worthwhile causes. 

One particular effort we've focused on is promoting women in aviation. Women make up more than half of our airfare members—those lucky ducks getting healthy snacks every month. And more than half the snacks we offer are made by women-founded companies. Companies like Lupii and Thunderbird, Karen’s Naturals and Mary’s Gone Crackers, Earthy Krunchy Snacks and Fruit Bliss. More on them in a moment.

But our support for this movement goes so much further than our own company. We’re inspired both by the history of women in aviation and the progress of female aviators in recent decades across all sectors. And from this inspiration we've developed a desire to help and to ensure opportunity and equality in this great industry. And there's much work left to do.

We've already done some work in this area. In 2021, for example, we gave out healthy snacks in Atlanta to the lovely ladies at the International Society of Women Airline Pilots (ISA+21) and worked with Female Aviators Sticking Together (FAST). We’re also partnering with women doing big things in this world, iIncluding Lisa Holland and her outsized, positive impact on private aviation over at Sheltair.

This past weekend, we were back for more, putting our snacks where our mouths are. This time in Music City.

The gracious people at Women in Aviation International (WAI)invited us to give out snacks to the 4,000-plus attendees at their 33rd annual conference. In the spirit of the weekend, we fueled up female flyers with bars, kale chips, and nuts and (snack) balls exclusively from our women-founded snack partners.

Fitness and nutrition go together like snacks and pouches. They just fit, each doing part of the job of keeping us healthy on the go.

While studies show that nutrition is likely the most important thing to get right, fitness is a close second on the way to a long, happy life. There are other risk factors—avoiding things like smoking and driving drunk, for example—but fitness and diet are 1A and 1B on the longevity list. 

As you know, airfare has your nutrition covered, and every once in a while, we like to bring you on-the-go fitness advice from true experts...most of whom happen to be satisfied airfare customers. Beyond snacking, our broader mission is to make healthy eating easier on the go. 

This week, we bring you fitness advice from a guy you should probably heed: Chris Castellano from Fittest Travel. Why listen to Chris?

For starters, the man is a beast.

While most weeks we bring you information about the art and science of eating healthier while traveling, there’s a whole lot more behind our mission of empowering an on-the-go healthy lifestyle.

Our daily work with pilots, flight attendants, and commercial and general aviation businesses keeps us collaborating with people whose lives are…up in the air. We want to share the wealth of knowledge they’ve accumulated about how to best operate when you’re flying high.

So today, we’ll change it up a bit and bring you the “secrets of the sky” from studly pilot Jack Weber.

Kate Flynn is a badass.

An accountant with an MBA from a little place called Harvard (shoutout to Cambridge, MA, airfare HQ!), she won PepsiCo’s WomenMade Challenge in 2020.

On top of all of that, she—along with hubby Bryan—started one of our absolute favorite snack companies: Sun & Swell. Their family’s hard work yielded a true #actuallyhealthy snack company with a focus on clean, delicious products and sustainable packaging.

The story behind the company is as great as the brand itself.

At airfare, our members come from both sides of the travel equation—passengers and flight crew. The thread that binds them together is their jobs and lives require constant movement and living on the go...both in the air and on the ground. 

We've spent significant time and energy working with both passengers and crew members in the private travel space with fixed-base operators and private charter companies, and now we're broadening our focus. As we roll into 2022 and watch the travel industry continue to stabilize, we're excited soon run some really cool campaigns, partnerships, and events in commercial aviation.

These developments will include events with Female Aviators Sticking Together, the International Society of Women Airline Pilots, and Women in Aviation. And other coming partnerships will be in tandem with several major airlines. 

Our first commercial collaboration of 2022 is here: a partnership with CLEAR, the airport security company. 

Two years ago, a pilot we know realized he had a problem. Out of respect for his anonymity, let's call him Issac.

On one hand, things were going great. He was doing the thing he loved—flying the skies, seeing the world, and rising through the ranks on his way to becoming a a commercial pilot. 

But Issac's pursuit of those goals started to take a toll on him without him noticing. 

The advantages of the "fly life"—the excitement, new people, and new scenery—also created challenges. For a while, he simply dealt with them. But eventually these small challenges became a big enough problem that he was forced to change.

“It all sort of hit me at once,” Issac said. “It was ugly.” 

Ashley Stevens didn’t always make delicious snacks. 

She was once a corporate woman. Stevens, who is from North Andover, Massachusetts, worked for The Hershey Company, and, like many in the airfare milieu, earned her stripes on the road. 

Years into her corporate gig, she noticed the complete absence of easy, healthy options when on the go. “I was on the road constantly and needed a really healthy snack,” Ashley said. “So I started experimenting with a teeny dehydrator right in my kitchen.”  

Over a period of five years, she developed many variations of healthy recipes at home and shared with family and friends. After lots of trail and error, she landed on three flavors to share with customers

We absolutely love all three flavors, and we're so inspired by her origin story.

Typically, when we think about diet, we think about protein, carbohydrates or fats. 

Some of us may want to increase good fats (avocados, nuts), decrease carbs (sugar, white flower), and maintain protein intake. Or maybe your focus is keeping intake of bad fats low (trans or saturated fat) and good carbs high (whole grains, beans, fruit, veggies). From diet to diet, things change. 

 However, there is one nutrient that almost every diet recommends increasing: fiber.

 Whether you’re Paleo, vegan, keto or pegan (yes, that’s real), more dietary fiber should be on the menu. Yet hardly anyone eats enough.

Oh, LGA. We love to hate you. 

LaGuardia could be one of the best (worst) examples of the city-to-airport health paradox that we mentioned in our article about LAX. New York City is one of the easiest places to access healthy restaurants. But as accessible as salads and smoothies are in Manhattan and Brooklyn, they're nearly impossible to find at the nation's 21st busiest airport just to the east. 

It seems there is a place to build a custom salad on almost every street corner in NYC, including in the countless delis. On top of the access to greens, beans, and veggies, add the gazillion smoothie, fast casual, and health-focused food chains, and you just can’t miss. All parts of the city are conducive to health seekers. 

LaGuardia is quite a different story, even with its shiny new renovation of Terminal B nearly complete. We stretched just to round out a list of five healthy options, with two of them qualifying only as barebones backups. 

But don't don’t worry—if you find yourself without airfare snacks at LGA, there are few diamonds in the rough. Here they are. 

When you think about private travel, what comes to mind?  

We picture a Fortune 500 CEO or an elite athlete eating buttered lobster and drinking champagne. Either that or Austin Powers’ tie-dyed jumbo jet. “When you see this jet a-rockin,’ don’t come a-knockin’ baby, yeah!”

Our experience in the last few months, however, has completely changed our perception of the industry. We now see another side to private travel oriented toward safety and service, a more familial side focused on culture and giving.

And we owe that shift in perspective to our newest partner, Sheltair, its caring staff, and its president, Lisa Holland. 

We get it.

Sometimes you slip up and order too few snacks from airfare. When that happens, and you're on day 4 of a trip, you need to scramble for some healthy food. But healthy options at airports are few and far between, especially with Delta on the loose (the variant, not the airline 😉).

To help you out, we're compiling the top five #actuallyhealthy places to eat in the 10 busiest US airports (50 places total), which we'll  publish in our forthcoming Airport Survival Guide.

But, as a special gift to our airfare crew, we'll release a few large airports on the blog over the next few months...starting with Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL).

Sup, snackers—

We’ve all been told that adding more fruits and vegetables to our diets is one of the best things we can do to improve sleep, mood, judgement, and overall health. And that’s true.

When people talk about avocados as one of the healthiest foods available, is it simply because they are a fruit, or is there something else about avocados that is uniquely healthy?

Last week we gave you a preview of our Airport Survival Guide, starting with how to eat healthy at ATL. This week, we’re going to get a little broader.

After all, 45,000 or so flights took off around the country yesterday, and 43,000 of them were from airports other than Atlanta. So let’s talk about a place you can find at nearly every airport in the US—Starbucks. 

Remember the 90s? When the topic of improving overall health began to take hold. Gyms became more popular, dieting more prevalent, and a focus on nutrients emerged. This was a big step for getting people into the gym and to think about diet. But it also led to some confusion.

In the case of diet, the health trends went one of two ways. Unfortunately, neither was actually healthy.

Ahh, Los Angeles—beaches, mountains, Hollywood, Silicon Beach, and, of course, acai bowls. One of the easiest things to do in Los Angeles, whether you’re in the Hollywood Hills or down by Muscle Beach, is to find healthy food. It’s nearly impossible to walk a block in this city without stumbling into a juice bar or pilates studio. LA doesn’t just do health well—it throws wellness in your face.  

Unfortunately, Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) does not follow suit. Despite being the fifth-busiest airport in the country in terms of passenger volume, and located in a town who's mascot should be an oat milk matcha smoothie bowl, #actuallyhealthy options are tough to find. That is, unless you know where to look.

A number of members have requested more frequent updates to help them stay up to date on our newest snacks, service improvements, company updates and healthy travel news.

Who are we to stand between you and the pure joy of our writing? 😜 

So, here we go.

Fly folks, we're bringing you something special this week. 

We’ve hinted in recent weeks at our forthcoming Travel Survival Guide: How To Stay Fit and Eat Healthy On The Fly, and one aspect of it will highlight the best places to eat healthy in the busiest airports in the country. We’ve already leaked some of those, including Atlanta Hartsfield (ATL), Los Angeles International (LAX), and Chicago O'Hare (ORD). 

Our Survival Guide will also contain interviews with experts on how they maintain their fitness, nutrition, and wellness while traveling and flying. Below is a sneak-peak at insights from one of our favorite fitness experts, Fernando Contreras, better known as @FitAviatorsClub. 

airfare fam–

You can't say we didn't warn you. The second you asked us to open our newsletter mouths, we're having trouble keeping them shut. 😁

This week's subject: pouches, pouches and more pouches. We have exactly three things to tell you about pouches—including a way for you to save some cash—and then we're outta here. Check out airfare member Matthew E. over there with the perfect pouch model pose.

Is there anything better than a good bar?  

Just give us 200 calories of healthy goodness, and we're all set. They're convenient, they're affordable, and, to borrow a word from Will Ferrell’s portrayal of James Lipton, they’re... scrumtralescent. 

Unfortunately, there are a lot of bad bars roaming around out there. It’s not that the snack makers are ill-intentioned. More likely, they're anchoring on priorities other than using the cleanest, simplest whole-food ingredients. That often results in unhealthy options or things that taste somewhere between chalk and sand. 

That’s why just for you, our airfare faithfuls, we went on a North American bar hunt to find the best in the business. It took us all the way from San Jose, Costa Rica to Manasquan, New Jersey and from San Diego, California to New York City.

We're thrilled to introduce the Jonesbar, our newest edition to the lineup of best-out-there, #actuallyhealthy bars we've had the pleasure of biting into.

But here's the thing: it was almost a burrito. 😳 

Ian Walker has been in the natural food game since before it was cool.

In the mid-90s, when Ian started Skeet and Ike’s—an all-natural nut butter company—most PB & J sandwiches still relied on a corn syrup-filled product like Jif or Skippy. The natural movement hadn’t entered our vocabularies or lives, let alone our nut butters. Butter, made out of almonds? 

Some of the people leading that natural trend were in the Canadian town of Burnaby, British Colombia. Them, and probably some other hippies, as you'll soon see. 

For context, Barney Butter, currently the top-selling almond butter on Amazon, does $20M in annual sales. It was founded in 2006 but didn’t see traction until 2010. Justin’s, a nut butter company that sold for $280M in 2016, didn't get started until 2004.

The bottom line is that Ian was a snack innovator ahead of his time. He was selling nut butters a decade before the trend, so it’s no surprise he’s done the same thing with other snacks.

Let's be clear—eating healthy is hard, no matter who you are. But it's much harder on the go. This is especially for flight crew and frequent travelers due to unpredictable schedules, fast-paced lifestyle, and limited food choices.

And most crew and travelers accept this. "It’s part of the job," they say, "the price of a life on the fly."  But you think differently.

You're are not willing to accept this trade-off. There are ways to set yourself up for success on the road, whatever the effort required.  

airfare snacks are—no surprise—for the air, and the people that hang out there a lot. People like pilots, flight attendants, and George Clooney "Up In the Air" types. People like you.

 But not always. 

Usually, our 50+ plant-based goodies are eaten in the sky or during a brief stop between flights, but our members also save their snacks to enjoy elsewhere. Unfortunately, it's not just planes and airports that lack convenient, healthy options.  

The first few examples of this "other place" eating were obvious. Take hotels, for example. It’s no secret that the most hotel restaurants leave much to be desired on the health front, and don’t get us started on the minibar. 

But other examples are not so obvious.

Though airfare was born near the sunny beaches of Venice, California, we’ve traded the sun and ocean for the snow and chowdah of Cambridge, MA. So if your snack pouches come with a little frost on them, you’ll know why.

One of the advantages of being in Boston (besides picking up a wicked cool accent) is  developing an intimate knowledge of Logan Airport. And today we’re excited to share  one of the best-kept secrets at Logan relevant to anyone on the go in Beantown: where to get the best coffee.

For this specific coffee secret, you'll have to fly through or stop in Terminal B. In the future we’ll release a deeper dive into Logan, including where to get the healthiest food. For now, let's grab some java. 

Bruce Namenson has an inspiring story.  

At age 50, he changed his diet, his career, and his life, eventually leading to one of the highest quality, most innovative, and—of course—healthiest snack companies in existence: Healthy Truth.

In his former life, Bruce was an attorney. He started working as a cop and wanted dive deeper into the legal side of his work, so he went to law school. After graduation, he worked as a public defender, putting as much care into helping each person as he would eventually would put into the creation of high-quality snacks. 

We’ve been talking a big game about our forthcoming Travel Survival Guide. And so far, we hope we’ve backed it up. We've released little bits along the way, like our interview with fitness expert and coach Fernando Contreras and our guide to the healthiest places to eat at LAX, ATL or ORD. 

Today, we’re going to continue that trend by introducing one of our favorite parts of the Travel Survival Guide—a section called "Secrets of the Skies." 

One of the best parts about running airfare is the great travelers and crew we’ve been able to meet. It's even better when they happen to be as bubbly and enthusiastic as Emilie, a flight attendant, and Sam, a US Air Force Pilot, who we'll introduce you to below. 

Connections like these often lead to great (and hilarious) insights about flying. In other words, "secrets of the skies."

We are a subscription snack company aiming to make it easier to eat healthy on the go. Typically, you can only find us online, but that is beginning to change. airfare is coming out of its e-commerce cocoon and into the real world. I guess that makes us the butterflies of healthy travel snacks. 

A prime example was the wonderful event we had last week at Banyan Air Service in Fort Lauderdale. Banyan invited us to introduce our 50+ healthy snacks to its wonderful staff and customers. We had a ton of fun, so we want to tell you all about it.

It’s hard to imagine a better person to advise on fitness while traveling than the 12-Minute Athlete, Krista Stryker. 

Krista is a certified personal trainer, a published author, and a speaker on the topics of fitness and mindset. In 2013, she founded a high-intensity interval training app, website, and business geared at solving the challenge of staying fit when time and space are limited.  So she built a "system of workouts that could be done in little space, with few pieces of equipment, and in the shortest time possible."

What could be more useful for flight crew and travelers? 

airfare exists to make healthy eating easier on the go. And we think we're pretty good at it. But sometimes, even our 50+ healthy snacks can’t save the day.  

The most prepared pilots, flight attendants and savvy travelers will still find themselves in a bind at an airport. It even happens to us at airfare, and we're surrounded by thousands of healthy snack options on a daily basis. At some point, we all end up at Laguardia with the rock-and-a-hard-place choice between Auntie Anne’s pretzels and Dunkin' Donuts.

Enter the Airport Survival Guide: a way to find the healthiest food options in the country’s busiest airports. For 50 airports around the nation, our Guide will showcase a handful of great places to go, trying to cover each terminal.