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Walking the floor of Manhattan’s Javits Center felt surprisingly similar to an after-work trip to the supermarket. I wandered the crowded fluorescent-lit aisles, following the faint smell of cheese and filling a reusable shopping bag. Shoppers dressed in business casual eyed fried foods under hot lamps and carefully considered endless rows of sauces, snacks, and sodas. Then a mascot dressed as a packet of olives waddled past, breaking the spell.
The Specialty Food Association’s Summer Fancy Food Show is basically a grand-scale grocery run, only it’s buyers from the grocery stores themselves, not consumers, doing the shopping. Brokers scout items to stock shelves, and start-ups sample hot new products with hopes of striking a deal. The trade show attempts to anticipate what grocery shoppers will want to eat and drink; it can also reflect the changing tastes of American shoppers.
I attended the industry-only event to scout the latest products to ascertain what we regular shoppers can anticipate on our supermarket shelves in the coming months. Over two days of snacking and chatting with booth representatives, here are the three biggest takeaways.
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Outside the Javits Center, marketing representatives for the functional beverage brand Brēz handed cold lion’s mane brews to the flocks of sweaty-browed businesspeople who filed outside.
Drinks containing adaptogens—with plant- or mushroom-based ingredients like lion’s mane that are marketed on the premise of stress-relieving and other beneficial properties—were well represented at the trade show and are currently booming in the nonalcoholic beverage market.
“People didn’t know what adaptogens were in 2015,” said JW Wiseman, CEO of Curious Elixirs, a long-standing brand of functional beverages. “Now the general public is starting to know what adaptogens are, and we’re seeing more demand in that.”
Despite the increase in the popularity of adaptogenic beverages in the last five years, people still don’t always understand what they’re being sold. Purported effects promised “a natural lift without anything addictive” from Curious Elixirs and “a different mood state” from Brēz.
Based on conversations with beverage suppliers, the industry is splintering on how to communicate adaptogens within nonalcoholic beverages to consumers. Mocktail brands like For Bitter For Worse, Töst, and Dirty Virgin said they shy away from using functional ingredients, citing concerns about understudied interferences with alcohol, recreational drugs, and antidepressants. Regardless of the rift, adaptogens are increasingly appearing on nonalcoholic drink labels to meet growing consumer interest.
“I’m seeing that there’s a renewed focus on craft and clean ingredients, because people are waking up to the fact that just because something is nonalcoholic doesn’t mean that it’s good for you,” Wiseman said. The ambiguous conversation continues.
Familiar restaurant name brands have long dominated the supermarket sauce aisle. Rao’s successful deal with Campbell’s Soup only further encouraged other brick-and-mortar establishments to throw their hat into the grocery ring.
The pandemic’s lingering strain on the service industry and consumers’ financial struggles are driving forces for restaurant brands selling consumer products. They use their beloved namesakes to sell favorite menu items at a lower price, though the store versions often cost more than their generic counterparts.
Michael Cacace of Michael’s of Brooklyn is one of the restaurateurs who took the jump with success.
“You want to bring a little piece of that home– and at a much less expensive price,” said Cacace, whose sauce sells in the middle $5 to $10 range of the typical shelf options.
Among the new and veteran sauces, other restaurant brands made their debuts at the show. Zucker’s, a New York City bagel brand, is offering frozen par-baked bagels to be finished at home in the air fryer. Zahav, an Israeli restaurant in Philadelphia, is launching a supermarket hummus line using its in-house recipe.
Can the restaurant experience be packaged? The consumer food industry, aware of shifting financial needs and hoping to capitalize on the social media fame of well-known restaurants, seems willing to take the risk.
There’s a lot of noise on the internet right now about gut health and hitting “protein goals” (a cultural conversation that we, too, have waded into). These trending food-meet-wellness topics were on full display, offering a glimpse of where things may be headed.
Prescriptive language about health dominated the show floor. I encountered an ice cream pint loaded with 40 grams of protein, protein sprinkles (yes, really), and a cottage-cheese-packed Buffalo chicken dip. Beyond traditional fermented foods like kefir and kimchi, a plethora of other products were packaged with a “gut-healthy” label.
Brands are responding to people’s earnest interests in well-being, likely driven by nationwide conversations like the rising rate of colorectal cancer among young Americans. The tastes of fitness-obsessed corners of the internet (especially on TikTok) are also a disorienting force to be reckoned with for food suppliers and consumers alike. The consumer food industry is now also aiming to serve the dietary needs of a rapidly expanding group of Americans using GLP-1 drugs.
Where is the diet-culture discourse headed? To be honest, we’re just as disoriented as you are. If the long lines at the Amish butter and full-fat dairy booths were any indication, perhaps the cultural zeitgeist has gone so far in the health-optimized direction that interests have circled back to more basic, whole foods-based beginnings.
- Not exactly new, but canned water brands are embracing packaging resembling beer. The new brand Free Bird seems to be to country music what Liquid Death is to heavy metal.
- I sampled more chili crisp than I care to count and was intrigued to see some fresh twists on the trending and traditional Chinese flavor profile. Bombay Chili Crunch and Jala-Lujah Jalapeño Chili Crisp were two favorites.
- Sustainable startups like Figa Foods emphasized a future-minded focus on regenerative farming. They use cupuaçu, “the cousin of the cocoa plant,” to make their chocolate-esque bars.
- Savory shake-ups of common breakfast aisle items caught me pleasantly by surprise. I’ll be keeping an eye out for Gamsa Foods’s Korean-inspired savory oatmeal and Absurd Snacks’s chickpea and granola crunch mix as they expand into grocery stores.