CELIACTODAY

The online retailer AllergyGrocer.com is owned by Miss Roben’s, Inc., which began life in 1992 as a maker of gluten-free mixes, a limited line of cookies, and some other GF products. However, as customers began seeking more products free of gluten and other allergens, the owners expanded into a much broader array of offerings. The hundreds of products in the GF area of AllergyGrocer.com include breads, pastas, soups, desserts of all kinds, candies, syrups, snacks, prepared meals, and more. You can search by product type, allergen, manufacturer, and more. The company is based in Hagerstown, MD, northwest of Baltimore.

The Seattle-based e-tailing giant’s entry into the GF grocery business is a sign of just how big food companies expect the GF category to become. Amazon.com sells a very wide variety of GF goods, ranging from the standards (breads, desserts, pastas, etc.) to the somewhat exotic (smoked meats, condiments and chocolates, for example). But if the range of offerings is wide, the selection is shallow. Each major GF manufacturer is represented by a very small number of products—sometimes as few as one or two—within each product category. The site does, however, offer one compelling attraction: By purchasing items in bulk, you can save substantial amounts of money. Recently, for example, Amazon was offering a case of eight 10-ounce packages of Glutino penne pasta for less than $15.89. By contract, the price on Glutino’s GlutenFree.com site was $21.52.

GlutenFree.com is owned by Glutino Foods, a manufacturer of GF foods based in Laval, Quebec, a suburb of Montreal. The company produces Glutino baked goods and pastas, and Gluten-Free Pantry mixes. Besides the company’s own brands, the web site sells a variety of items by some of North America and Europe’s best-known GF brands, including Bi-Aglut, Glutano and Kinnikinnick.   Gluten-free.com is very attractive, clear and easy to use. Sale items and new products are attractively highlighted, and you can find the “best sellers” in any category with a single click. The site also has a simple but powerful search engine that allows you to find products by product type or brand.

GlutenFreeMall.com is owned by Scott Adams, a pioneer in using the Internet to connect people with celiac. Three years before creating GlutenFreeMall.com in 1998, Scott founded celiac.com, one of the earliest web sites dedicated to the disease. Both operations are based in Santa Rosa, CA, about 60 miles north of San Francisco.   GlutenFreeMall.com sells a very large and broad assortment of baked goods, prepared foods and ingredients, as well as books, newsletters, databases of GF foods and drugs, and even “Gluten Busters” T-shirts.    Though the site is a bit visually “busy,” it is reasonably easy to navigate. One nice feature allows you to shop by a particular manufacturer within a product category.

The independent online retailer offers a great variety of well-known gluten-free brands, including Schär, Pamela’s, Gluten-Free Pantry and many more. GlutenSolutions.com also partners with the Silly Yak Bakery in Madison, WI, which will deliver fresh-baked GF goodies directly to your door.   The easy-to-navigate online store allows you to see instantly how other customers rate each product, as well as how many units of a particular item the company has in stock. In several ways, however, the site is seriously deficient. For example, information about the prevalence of celiac is out-of-date; the recipe “section” is an afterthought (it contains only two); several links are broken; and the software delivering customer comments often crashes.

As its name might suggest, this online store vends a broad array of “wellness” groceries, of which gluten-free food is only one category. The other areas of focus are organic foods, natural foods, personal care items and supplements.  Because GF products are only a sideline, the range of goods suitable for celiacs is quite limited at WellnessGrocer.com. The company is based in Lafayette, LA.