Getting Your Groove Back: Groovy Foods

Getting Your Groove Back: Groovy Foods
by Terre Gorham

Detours are a recurring but welcome force in Uele Siebert's life. The owner of Groovy Foods, a healthy line of granola, herbal blends, oils, and vinegars, is thankful for the circuitous paths that have meandered through her journey so far in life. After all, they're responsible for her current destination.

Equally important along her artistic course is her muse — spiritual sources that help guide her along the detours, gently directing her focus where it needs to be so she can accomplish things of which she's not yet aware.

It's not as mystical as it may sound, but it is powerful. Siebert was a hair stylist living a disconnected life in Seattle when the thought of coming to Memphis first entered her mind. When she arrived in 2001 (via more detours than space here allows), a random glance in a magazine placed the opening of Downtown's Butler Street Bazaar on her radar. She decided to make something to sell there.

She toyed with the idea of making soaps and candles — she even went out and bought all the materials to do so. Then she looked at what she'd purchased and thought, "I don't make soaps and candles. Why am I doing this? I'm going to devote myself to food, because food is what I love. It's what I understand; it's the language I speak."

To this day, Siebert is not entirely sure where the idea to create a granola mixture came from — not that that's important to her anyway. One of her past detours — this one to Kansas City — had steered her to a friend who toasted seeds and wrapped them in nori rolls. Later, in Memphis, Siebert would recall that recipe and incorporate it into the granola mixture that seemed to create itself.

Her most popular line, Civil Granola, is a salty-sweet mix of oats and seeds — sunflower, pumpkin, sesame, and flax — held together with a small amount of cane juice and brown-rice syrup. Instead of a high-carb, high-sugar snack, Siebert's granola provides a protein-balanced, heart-smart dietary supplement.

The herbal tea line? "It just came to me, too" she says. "One night I started mixing some herbs from my kitchen cabinet — peppermint, lavender, chamomile, basil, rosemary. It was wild! Everything was completely inspired."

Inspiration did not keep the Butler Street Bazaar open, but it did strike Siebert again in 2006 when the Memphis Farmers Market opened.

Having already given wings to her fledgling business through local coffee houses, vegan cafes, food co-ops, and the like, Siebert's granolas and teas had name recognition and a rapidly growing fan base. When she heard about the Farmers Market, she had just incorporated her Groovy Food business. Expanding into the market with its focus on health was a natural next step.

The granola goddess brings her all-natural line of goods — fresh from her kitchen in Midtown — to her customers — new and old — who delight in the good taste and healthy ingredients.

On any given market day, shoppers can find Civil and Dark Star Granola (Civil Granola with vegan-friendly semi-sweet chocolate); steamed bread (wheat-free, yeast-free, dairy-free, cake-like bread made with brown rice flour and Amaranth flour, sweetened with brown rice syrup and rehydrated fruits only); herbal olive oil, balsamic, and red wine vinegar; Herbal and Flower (made with honey from the apiaries of Bill and Joyce Hughes in Brighton, TN); grain blends (for breakfast or as nourishing, soothing baths and body scrubs); Seaweed Salad; Herban Hair Cider (apple cider vinegar with nettles and rosemary for scalp and hair health); sunflower body oils, featuring Green Goddess (parsley, nettles, rosemary) and Sun Goddess (rose petals, chamomile, lavender); and a diverse line of herbal blends.

For those customers with their own inspirations or special requests, Siebert will gladly modify her tried-and-true formula to suit. And, of course, as her own inspirations occur, the line will grow.

"It's so much fun," she says. "I really enjoy the community aspect of the market. It's a meeting ground for people. There are so many areas of connection and intersection. Being at the market is more like a spiritual experience."

And Siebert will run with that experience — that connecting and intersecting spiritual energy — until she comes to the next fork in the road, knowing full well that wherever life decides to take her, she's got the drive and the guidance to turn it into a groovy business.