What happens when a fitness enthusiast, who’s always prepping for races, and a style maven, to whom every second is a fashion moment, get together to create something healthy?
The Mood Food Bar is what happens. It’s an all-natural granola bar—with no artificial coloring, no artificial flavors, zero cholesterol, low sodium, and zero fructose corn syrup.
Behind the Mood Food Bar is fashion stylist and entrepreneur Liz Uy, along with her husband, tech businessman, dedicated racer, and Run.ph founder Raymond Racaza. 

Mood Food Bar isn’t Liz’s first food venture. In 2016, she launched Mood Bake, a result of her desire to make her dream cookie come true—crunchy on the surface, gooey on the inside, a little burned on the top. 
She isn’t a stranger to food and cooking either. A toque is one of the many hats she wears, and she has the gravitas to wear it. Baking was a childhood passion as well as watching and helping the staff whip up, say, a leche flan, in the home kitchen. She pursued a Hotel, Restaurant, and Institution Management degree at De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde and applied herself to a refresher course on pastry baking at the Center for Asian Culinary Studies. More important, needless to say, Liz has taste.

She has more reason to be in the kitchen now that she is a wife and mother. “I love cooking and baking for my husband and our little boys,” says Liz. “Some of my clients would also request for some whenever I would make a batch. From there, it grew to what it is today.”
Granola seems to be a logical choice for Mood Food, the new entrepreneurial venture she and Raymond launched late last year, just as the Christmas rush kicked in. For one, granola, I read somewhere, is considered by some as the original influencer food for wellness.
Invented by New York nutritionist James Caleb Jackson in 1863, it was first called Granula, after the granules of Graham flour, from which it was developed as an alternative to the typical high-cholesterol American breakfast of eggs, sausages, bread and butter, and cooked grains. Shortly after his invention, he got into a legal skirmish with Dr. John Harvey Kellog, whom he sued for stealing both the idea and the name. Jackson won the lawsuit, prompting Kellog—and his brother William Keith Kellog, who founded the eponymous cereal company decades later in 1906—to change the name to granola, which stuck.

As the Kellog company started to sell better-tasting cereals like corn flakes and rice crispies and, later, corn pops and frosted flakes, granola became unpopular, especially after Jackson ceased production of Granula in 1971, only to be revived later by health food faddists and the increasing demand for a healthy alternative to breakfast and snacks. 
Granola nowadays is generally considered healthy, dense in calories and rich in protein, fiber, and micro-nutrients like B vitamins and vitamin E, zinc, magnesium, iron, selenium, and copper. Its nutritional value, however, depends on ingredients added to make it more palatable and enjoyable.

Mood Food is 100 percent healthy. “It’s all-natural, made with whole grains and only six to eight ingredients,” says Liz. She herself loves the bars, as a prime motivation for setting up Mood Food was her and her husband’s constant—always frustrated—search for granola snack bars that were “delicious, accessible, and affordable.”
At the moment, there are seven variants to choose from, such as Cranberry with Acai, Mango with Chia Seeds, Oatmeal Raisin with Ashwagandha, Mango Coconut with Maca, Chocolate with Sea Salt, Peanut Butter, and Chocolate Peanut Butter. There are five more variants under the Mood Food Kids line reinforced with probiotics.

If you have yet to get serious with your resolve to make this year a better one for yourself, you might consider Mood Food. After all, as Liz puts it, “One of the most common resolutions to start the year is to live a better lifestyle. You can start with your snack choices, especially since what’s in fashion now is knowing what you put inside your body.” 
While this health trend, unlike fashion, should not be seasonal, Mood Food is a fashionable choice. Cool, fun, and appetizing in their packaging, the on-the-go granola bars look chic in your bag or in your hand when you stealthily take a bite during long waits at the door at Fashion Week, while jetting between classes, or at your desk at mid-day. “That’s how we approached the design of the packaging,” explains Liz. “I’m very particular about details.”

But how does Liz strike a balance between the apron and high heels? She laughs. “That quote on being a ‘jack of all trades’ isn’t negative. The complete quote is, ‘A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one,’” she quips.
For 2024, Liz is beyond excited. Already, Mood Food is gaining traction with more and more retail partners coming in both in the Philippines and abroad to help her share it with the world. Currently, the snack bars are available at select SM Malls and Shell Select and through Lazada and Real Food.