The keto snack we didn’t know we were waiting for

A puffed cheese snack that started as an “accident” has won the FoodStarter 2022 award, sending it to supermarket shelves nationwide.

Graham Manson, a Nelson-based marine electrician by trade, began playing around with making his own cheesy snacks during the first Covid-19 lockdown.

“I’m keto, so I was looking for a tasty treat that’s not difficult to eat,” he says. “A lot are made of almonds or pork scratchings, they get stuck in the back of your throat.”

Manson decided to work with cheese, a good food for the low-carb, high-fat and high-protein keto diet. But making a simple snack out of nothing but cheese was more complicated than it might seem.

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It took him “probably nine months, and lots of money” to develop a product he was happy with at any kind of scale.

“Each time I tried to make more of them, there was a different problem,” he says. “The cheese wouldn’t react the same way.”

During the development phase, Manson and his partner, accountant Sonya Thompson, started referring to the puffy bite-size snacks as “cubies”, because of their shape and the fact the cheese – which was “everywhere” at that time, Thompson says – was first cut into cubes.

“We’d just say to the kids, do you want to come and have some cubies,” she says.

The name stuck, so when Manson had a product he could turn out dozens at a time and was ready for sale, they decided to call the snack QB’s.

“Whether it was a good idea or not, I don’t know, but that was the way it came about,” Thompson says.

QB’s was well received by the Nelson community, and is stocked by several local suppliers.

But they will have to find a way of producing them at a much larger scale now, as the FoodStarter win will see QB’s stocked in 147 New World supermarkets around the country.

The win was “definitely very exciting” but “a little bit overwhelming”, and wouldn’t be without its challenges.

The rising price of cheese was a concern for Manson, as QB’s lists nothing else among its ingredients, “especially if foot and mouth comes in”.

Aware of the importance of diversity, Manson and Thompson had begun thinking of new flavours they could pair with the basic cheese.

“Most people are keen on chilli,” Thompson says. “Fennel’s been thrown out there, Marmite’s been thrown out there, garlic’s been thrown out there. For a more luxury brand somebody thought of wasabi or nori.

“We want to explore what we can do with cheese first but the long-term plan, the next five years or so, Graham is very keen to look at creating snacks that everyone likes but that are readily available for people who are on low-carb, who are coeliac, who have diabetes as well.”

Manson was planning to give up his day job and work on QB’s full time, which would be a “bump” for the family, Thompson says. “Particularly in today’s world when you need two wages to run a household.”

But winning the FoodStarter competition had been a great boost and the couple were ambitious for reaching their ultimate goal.

“We’d like to be an in-flight snack for Air New Zealand,” Manson says. “They don’t have a low-carb option. The dream is being an in-flight savoury option for Air New Zealand.”