I have yet to find a similar product available in the UK.  And trust me, I have searched!  Being unable to eat tomatoes without getting ill means I am always looking for tomato alternatives.  There is one product that crops up quite a lot if you do a search on the internet for “tomato free“, but it is an American product which I have not been able to find in the UK, and any mail-order sites I have found with it say that it is no longer available!  I wonder what happened to them 🙁

If you know of a product on the shelves in the UK that is like “Ally’s No Tomato Sauce”, then please PLEASE let me know.  Because I want to TRY IT!  (although I bet it is not as good) hehe…

Likewise, if I find any products that will make our (tomato intolerance sufferers) lives better, rest assured I will tell you about it here 😀

We have sent some samples off to various retailers over the past couple of weeks.  Really looking forward to seeing what feedback we get (and hopefully a bunch of orders too!).

Also thinking about doing a stand at some trade shows with Ally’s No Tomato Sauce.

Next week we plan to visit as many suitable local shops as we can to really get the area covered.

Being completely intolerant to tomatoes means the slightest hint of tomato can trigger symptoms and ruin my day.  Take yesterday for example: I ate a packet of Beef flavour Hula Hoops and spent the rest of the night on the loo.  Nice. Who’d have guessed that they contain tomatoes!?!? They are BEEF flavour – NOT beef and tomato!  Oh well.  It was my fault for not checking, and a good reminder that I always need to be on my guard.

So, I though I would start off a list of “Danger” foods.  I.e. foods that you might not at first consider would cause you harm, but have tomatoes in the ingredients. If you can think of any others, please leave a comment!

So here goes (foods that have caught me out in the past):

BEEF flavour hula hoops

Any Prawn Cocktail Flavour Crisps

Most brands of Sandwhich Pickle

Most brands of Brown Sauce

Strawberry Flavour Bootlace Sweets

Chilli and Lemon Twists

Walkers Sweet Chilli Sensations

A certain famous brand of mouth-wash contains a chemical which causes the same reaction.

I’ll add more when I can think of them…

TomatoFree now has a downloads page! Our first free download comes courtesy of Kori Clark Designs. Allergy Labels and Awareness Cards for kids – free to download and use. Print them out, use them and share them to help raise awareness of food allergy.

More free downloads to come. We will soon have our own TomatoFree screensaver and game! Woopwoop!

Tomato intolerance is a type of food intolerance specific to Tomatoes.  It is usually because the body doesn’t produce enough of a particular chemical or enzyme needed for digestion of the salicylates present in tomatoes. Even though eating tomatoes will not cause an immediate life-threatening allergic reaction in people who suffer with tomato intolerance, the lack of a specific enzyme in the body may also lead to the build up of toxic byproducts and histamine which can mimic the symptoms of an allergy.
So what are the symptoms?

Tomato intolerance is rarely harmful but can cause very unpleasant symptoms to the sufferer which can begin soon after, or several days after eating tomatoes.  Symptoms can include: nausea, bloating, abdominal pain, intestinal contractions, diarrhoea, flushing of the skin, palpitations, headache, urticaria (hives), and in extreme cases where there is a build up of histamine resulting in a pseudo allergic reaction, even difficulty breathing (in which case, you should seek immediate medical attention).  If you often suffer with any of these symptoms, I would strongly recommend you keep a strict food diary to help identify the trigger food.

How can it be diagnosed?

The only really accurate way to test for tomato intolerance is to remove tomatoes from your diet (including any products that may contain tomatoes as an ingredient – which can be quite tricky to do), see if the symptoms improve and then reintroduce tomatoes.  If the symptoms return, an intolerance is very likely.

Excellent news for everyone with tomato allergies:  Lubbards Farm Shop (in Hullbridge, Essex) will be stocking Ally’s No Tomato Sauce from tomorrow (the 1st of September 2010)! You can find all the other outlets via the Store Locator.

Great news! You can now order our fabulous tomato-free product online (UK Mainland only – for now at least).  Credit/Debit card or Paypal Payments are handled securely via PayPal.

You can order from the products pages.

The new labels are made!  The jars now have a very groovy rainbow stylee (Ally’s idea).

The new labels also have all the regulation stuff on them too – i.e. average product weight (e), ingredients, nutrition info (that took some time to work out I can tell you!) etc.

Ally says: “It looks so nice!”

… I agree 🙂  There is something very satisfying in making this stuff… trouble is, we keep eating it all before we can get it in the shops! Lol.

The site development is coming along nicely. The Contact Us page is now live, so if you have any comments or suggestions let us know!  Thanks 🙂

Hehe… we put a fun spin on our baked beans tonight.  Instead of using Haricot Beans, we used huge Butter Beans!  Really simple to make:  Just make a “Blonde Roux” then add water or vegetable stock whilst stirring until you get baked bean sauce consistancy. Add in a jar of Ally’s No Tomato Sauce, and to make it really smooth like real baked beans, blitz the whole thing with a hand blender.  Then simply add your beans (if using dried ones, make sure you have soaked them properly as per their instructions first).  Bring it all to the boil and simmer until the beans are soft.  Fantastic!  We served them up with fish and chips and it was Uber Tasty! 🙂