Chia Nation promotes healthy eating, healthy living
Chia Nation has been at the forefront of educating and raising public awareness on the importance of eating healthy foods. The company is not just a restaurant but also serves as a platform and catalyst of positive change, according to Sheikha Muneera Issa al-Thani who provided details about her company.
Can you tell us about Chia Nation, its beginnings, and the role that it plays in educating and raising awareness on the importance of healthy eating and living?
Chia Nation is a concept that focuses on building a healthier environment in a holistic way for the current and future generations. Chia Nation comes from the word Chia which means strength or strong in the Mayan language. In other words, Chia Nation is here to help in building a strong nation. Our objective is to create a positive shift in the current lifestyle. We believe that food and intellect are linked. So, if we want to innovate and develop our nation to become a positive contributor to the global community, then we need to eat healthier and engage in productive conversations. That is why Chia Nation is not just a restaurant, but a platform and an agent of positive change. We open our space for people who have valuable knowledge to share and we serve healthy and delicious foods to spark tasteful and important conversations. We welcome people from our community to share their knowledge and speak about all important topics such as finance, wellness, business, culture, history, technology, education, and more every Saturday. I would really like to encourage everyone to contact us via our channels if they would like to participate as speakers or attend the sessions.
We also target other businesses owners and encourage them to create more healthy and clean products. We worked with a local business to create our decadent chocolate bars. They never used coconut sugar in their bars before. And we pushed them to use the ingredients we saw fit to our brand ethos. We also encourage local talents to work on branding for local businesses in an attempt to keep our identity alive. We see numerous local businesses choosing very westernised brand identity. I believe a modern take on the local culture is the best way to keep the heritage alive. And yet be modern and appeal to different generations. We worked with the * artist, Sheikh Mubarak bin Nasser al-Thani because his elements go really well with our sand dunes. So we collaborated with him to create a very interesting and attractive branding/packaging.
You mentioned in an interview before that what you are offering is “fast and healthy”. How special are your products and menu compared with other “healthy foods” in the market like granola and oat bars, among others, which are often high in fats, sugar, and calories?
After years of research and studying healthy foods in Qatar and all over the world. I realised that most ‘healthy’ foods are basically diet appropriate foods. This means that they cater to specific diets. Let’s take vegan foods as an example. Most vegan foods are loaded with processed ingredients such as, white flour, highly processed meat alternatives, white or brown sugar, and many other very harmful ingredients. Then you have the sugar-free foods where they usually use artificial sweeteners which are extremely harmful. On the other hand, most ‘healthy’ foods that we find in the market do not appeal to our local taste. Therefore, in order to convince our community that healthy actually tastes good, we had to present something that they would actually crave. That made me very determined to create products that are authentic and at the same time taste good to the point where you would crave it. So, at Chia Nation we only use natural sweeteners such as dates, honey, coconut sugar, and I believe that we are the only restaurant that uses monk fruit sugar, which is the healthiest zero sugar option.
At Chia Nation, we offer foods that are also friendly to people who suffer from intolerances and allergies without depriving them of the joy of indulging in the foods they love. Such as gluten-free and clean desserts. Hot meals that don’t contain processed ingredients. Some of the greatest and recurring comments we receive is that customers eat as much as they want from our foods but never feel sick or bloated and heavy afterwards. That’s a testament of the great quality food we bring.
We are also more reasonably priced compared to the market. We do not want to profit by breaking our customers’ bank accounts. We value our customers more than anything.
You mentioned before that, “the company envisions having a central kitchen that would supply healthy meals to schools, universities, and hospitals”. Are there any efforts to expand your business in Qatar and in the region?
We have a lot of exciting plans for our customers in the near future. Right now, we are developing strategies and concepts which align with our customers’ needs and interests. Hopefully, we will get into operationalisation soon enough and satisfy our customers as we always do.
How sustainable is your practice of serving healthy foods using organic and fresh recipes to your customers? Do you have a particular timeline for your plans to grow your own produce?
We are always experimenting with different ingredients and trying to come up with creative food options that are healthy and tasty. What I am trying to say is, it is a continuous process rather than a singular event. Of course, we have seen tremendous success in the service that we provide. We will sustain our best practices and roll out new services and products when the time comes.
We also encourage individuals and other businesses to live a sustainable lifestyle as much as possible. We have displayed in our restaurant a hydroponic farmstand where we grow our own herbs and use them in both our bar and kitchen. Our customers can experience picking their own herbs and add them to their tea, juice or smoothie. And by having that coollooking farmstand in our space we show our community how easy living sustainably can be. We have prepared exciting offers and special services for the World Cup. We will be live screening all the matches outdoors. And serving a special menu with beef sliders, nachos, popcorn, and more.
I highly encourage people to check them out and enjoy our tasty foods. People can visit us on our website https://chia-nation.com and follow us @chianation on instagram, facebook, and tiktok to get updates and keep up with our services. Thank you!