Fancy Food Show Reviews

This past Sunday I visited the Fancy Food Show at the Moscone Center in San Francisco - What a trip! I found out about the show from a friend who does catering, so I thought this was going to be more interesting than specifically useful to the food coaching business. I could not have been more wrong. Well, it was both extremely interesting and useful. Let me give you some general notes and some favorite product highlights:

General Notes
I started out in the natural and organic hall - hundreds and hundreds of vendors selling almost anything you can imagine. The most popular items were tea, crackers, nuts and chocolate. Not to mention that there were at least 7 or 8 specialty water companies selling basically the same thing. The market is clearly demanding these convenience snacks and a search for a 'healthy' sweet. What became evident immediately was that most all of these snacks are not whole foods (remember, a whole food is something you can read the ingredients on and it has less than 5 ingredients). They are purely trying to satisfy the new obsession with 'organic' as a title and the addiction to sweet or salty snacks. I had fun with the vendors asking what various ingredients were.
What was also interesting was the focus on packaging. I won't generalize and say all the companies are there to sell and profit, but I will say that many are. Rightfully so as so many people are not relying on whole foods to snack on, and prepare meals with. And they are reaching the masses through calculated packaging. Just a nice little reminder that you really need to turn the package over, read the ingredients and then make a choice....ask yourself 'do I want to put this in my body?'

Highlights
Redwood Hill Goat Farm - I love the goat milk yogurt from this company and I was able to meet the owners. Really great example of how you can just ask about farming practices and as soon as you see the passion and know how it is done, you are instantly drawn to want that product because you know it is ok for you.
Indian Food To Go by Tandoor Chef- for a prepared food, I didn't mind the ingredient list for this company, and it actually tasted dang good. It was interesting to see that there were at least 5 Indian pre-prepared food companies in this one hall. It's easy to make! I will try to get you more Indian recipes this year just to prove it to you.
Alternative Milks - we found several, but two that interested me were Living Harvest's Hemp Milk. Neutral taste, a list of ingredients I don't really know what everything is so I have more research to do. The other was called Mimi Creme and it was cashew and almond milk. Also need to do more research.
Natural Sodas: GUS (Grown Up Soda) was really good. Vignette (non alcoholic soda made from wine grapes) also great. Fentimans and Dry soda were also good. More whole ingredients, but definitely something for every now and then.
Cleaning Products - I am a big, huge fan of the Mrs. Meyers brand. Natural cleaning products that are super affordable. That wasn't new to me, but I wanted to highlight that I really like their products and it was fun to visit their booth. I did come across something new called Twist. They use natural, biodegradable product to clean your home and dishes, etc with. I had not thought about what my dish sponges were made from until I spoke with them. Check it out.
Redneck Pepper - The food was good, but these guys are funny as heck. Check them out at www.redneckpepper.com
Pre-packaged Grains - This company is just a few miles from me and I didn't know it until today so I hope to find out where she is distributing and more about the business, but www.ourdailygrain.com had some tasty samples to hand out and I really like their mission statement.
Tasty Baby - www. tastybaby.com I stopped by this booth and learned some really interesting things. I would advocate making as much of your baby food as you can, but this is a great alternative. It is frozen baby food, and it is all organic and they have BPA free containers. They had samples, but I felt a little awkward tasting....moving on. What I found interesting is that I often recommend that people eat frozen over canned foods because canned undergoes tremendous heat and pressure which reduces the nutritional value of your food. I never thought about that in the context of baby food in a jar. Turns out for Tasty Baby they have to heat the food to 185 and then flash freeze it compared to over 200 degrees for at least 30 minutes in the jarring process.
Republic of Tea - This booth was HUGE! And they had each type of tea brewed and ready to serve. We tried about 5 of them and it was delightful. Their tea is very accesible and I like each one I try. I think they have a few organic types, which is my only gripe, but I like their stuff.
Portion Controlled Chocolate - Chocolate and sweets and cookies were HUGE at this event. I really couldn't believe it. There were two companies I found that I didn't mind the ingredient list, liked the people and liked how they packaged for portion control - which I think helps when you are talking about sweets. www.sweetriot.com has these tic tac like boxes that hold their chocolates and the most concentrated dark chocolate also has espresso and they were dang tasty.