The last bite: Mr. Momo’s Lake Street factory supplies dumplings to Minneapolis restaurants

Welcome to “the last bite,” an end-of-week food and ag roundup from the Minnesota Star Tribune. Reach out to business reporter Brooks Johnson at brooks.johnson@startribune.com to share your news and favorite dumpling dipping sauces.

Subash Yadav started seriously slinging his signature Nepali-style dumplings six years ago, but in many ways, Mr. Momo is just beginning.

A buzzy food truck and acclaimed restaurant in Phoenix led to a spot serving the bite-size dumplings at Super Bowl LVII. The Arizona following was strong, despite pandemic pivots and a restaurant fire.

Then Minnesota came calling. The owner of Himalayan Restaurant in Minneapolis beckoned with an investment in a space on E. Lake Street and the equipment Mr. Momo would need to start stocking frozen dumplings with retailers.

“We were working in 1,000 square feet with a broken freezer — it was a no-brainer," Yadav said. “We can scale to a national level.”

Co-founder Alexis Poce said they packed up all their stuff “within a week and drove the food truck across the country.”

It’s a homecoming of sorts for Yadav, who grew up in Nepal and attended Southwest Minnesota State University in Marshall. (Poce is still acclimating to a decidedly non-desert environment.)

From their dumpling factory stocked with shiny equipment that opened earlier this year, Mr. Momo can turn out tens of thousands of dumplings a day. For now, the focus is on supplying local restaurants like Himalayan and Hyderabad Indian Grill and offering twice-weekly pickup orders ahead of a key certification and packaging redo.

“We’re at a 20-count dumpling size right now, and our adviser said that is too many,” Poce said. “‘You’ve got to encourage repeat business, people need to be able to go through them.’ So we have shrunk our package down from 20 to nine, and we’re in the middle of a reprint of all of our bags, and then we’re pushing back to stores.”

Minnesota’s pollution regulator recently fined General Mills about $18,000 for excess biomass boiler emissions at its Fridley oat mill.

How much time does it take for General Mills to earn that much money? About 29 seconds, based on the $19.5 billion in sales the company reported in the past year.

The Pollution Control Agency said its fines weigh “how seriously the violations affected or could have affected the environment, and whether they were first-time or repeat violations.”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is blocking additional specialty sugar imports this year amid claims “sugar imports have more than doubled” in the past 20 years. That’s not true. The nation’s sugar imports are set to drop to their lowest level since 2008 this year, the USDA previously reported, and will be about 20% above 2005 levels.

Either way, Minnesota’s nation-leading sugar beet growers will benefit. Strict import controls shape the country’s sugar industry, and right now, they greatly benefit sugar beet producers in Minnesota and around the country. But they also make raw sugar nearly twice as expensive here as it is around the world, which critics say is because of foreign subsidies.

Food scientists — and we have plenty of them here in Minnesota — converged in Chicago this week for the annual Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) conference.

No surprise there was a continued focus on ultra-processed foods this year, with some talks on weight-loss drugs and the difficulties of swapping in natural food dyes.

Speaking of...

Candy companies are decidedly not on board with the move to all-natural food dyes. While several major food companies, including General Mills, say they’ll voluntarily phase out synthetic colors in the next several years, consumers will still find Yellow No. 5 when tasting the rainbow of Skittles. Mars, which also makes M&Ms, originally pledged to ditch artificial dyes in 2016 but found American consumers actually do want them in candy.

The candy industry’s trade group told news outlets recently that their members will continue to follow federal laws and regulations — which remain unchanged, despite the FDA commissioner’s desire for synthetic food dyes to go away. Without actual legislation or rulemaking at the federal level, it’s ultimately state laws that could end up forcing a company’s hand, as Texas, California and West Virginia measures appear to be doing.