Made in Rancho Santa Fe: Ossum Bone Broth

Rancho Santa Fe’s Neda Faraji is promoting a healthy lifestyle through Ossum Bone Broth, a new wellness company she never even intended to start. With Ossum, she is sharing her healing bone broth “fresh off the kettle” in glass jars to her customers, ordered direct from her website.

The bone broth is a rich source of collagen, minerals and glycine, that can help with inflammation, improve gut health, increase joint mobility, strengthen hair and nails, restore muscles and make for a better night’s sleep.

Faraji first started drinking bone broth in 2017 when she was pregnant with her daughter and recovering from surgery.

“My biggest problem was I couldn’t find anything that was really authentic,” she said. Everything was boxed, used shelf stabilizers and was loaded with sodium: “I was already so swollen so I didn’t want to add any more salt to my diet.”

She made it her mission to make her own fresh, high-quality bone broth—she learned it’s an extremely exhaustive process, 18 to 24 hours to simmer for maximum nutrient extraction.

Ossum Bone Broth is made by Rancho Santa Fe’s Neda Faraji.

(Kimberly Motos)

“There was a lot that I didn’t know,” said Faraji, a 2006 Torrey Pines High School grad who comes from a background in retail and finance marketing.

With experimentation in the kitchen, she perfected her recipe using all-natural ingredients— absolutely no additives and never salt. She sources her pasture-raised bones from a local organic farm.

Bone broth can be used as a base for soups or smoothies or drank straight up.

“I don’t drink it cold, it’s really good hot,” Faraji said. “I like to add lemon, mint, parsley and extra ginger.”

She uses bone broth in stews, as a base for meats, to cook pasta or whip up tomato-braised lentils with broccoli rabe, one of many bone broth-starring recipes she has shared on social media.

During the pandemic, Faraji was sharing stories on Instagram and Facebook about what she was doing with her bone broth and got a lot of responses from people wanting to buy some. Due to the increasing demand, she started a bone broth account on Instagram calling her brand Ossum as it is Latin for bone plus it sounds, well, awesome. She heard from people fighting osteoarthritis, recovering from injuries and cancer patients –she was thrilled that her remedy could help more people.

The trickiest part has been the volume and scaling up, dealing with a fresh food item with a limited shelf-life—she understands why others might be tempted to add shelf stabilizers as it only lasts four to five days in the fridge and up to three months in the freezer.

Every day there are challenges for Faraji to work though in order to keep the integrity and nutrition of her bone broth but she is enjoying the process.

For now, she sells her Ossum Broth in two flavors of beef and chicken. To check out Ossum Bone Broth, visit Ossumbroth.com