STAFF PICKS: Best of the Fancy Food Show
After a two-year hiatus, Fancy Food Show returned to New York City last week, bringing over 1,800 exhibitors together to show off the latest the specialty food market has to offer. The AdAdapted team was on site to meet emerging brands and sample their newest products.
After a two-year hiatus, Fancy Food Show returned to New York City last week, bringing over 1,800 exhibitors together to show off the latest the specialty food market has to offer. The AdAdapted team was on site to meet emerging brands and sample their newest products.
The show included items ranging from spiked coconut water to plant-based fish to brand new shapes of pasta. After trying hundreds of items, the AdAdapted staff got together to highlight a selection of their favorite new foods.
PLANT-BASED ALTERNATIVES
If you’ve ever had an Impossible Burger, you know that plant based alternatives to meat are coming closer and closer to resembling and tasting like the real thing.
At Fancy Food, Good Catch shared several fish alternatives that could have easily passed, including a delicious new item - popcorn shrimp!
While plant-based meat alternatives can be marketed to vegans, they also respond to environmental and supply concerns that may affect food markets in the near future. Current Foods, which creates plant-alternative seafood products, is anticipating that a decrease in salmon populations will drive shoppers to look for alternatives within their category.
We particularly enjoyed their smoked salmon and roasted sesame tuna!
Are you lactose intolerant but desperately want pizza or macaroni and cheese? With the help of Alison Elliott, Founder and CEO of The Farmer Foodie, and her Everything Cheeze product, you can.
Everything Cheeze is a cashew nut dairy alternative powder that can be added directly to a dish or combined with water to form a cheesy alternative for those with dietary restrictions. The product made it to the finals of the Nosh Live pitch slam and may be available in major retailers as early as next year!
PASTA AND SAUCES
At AdAdapted, we’re constantly on the hunt for new pasta and sauce options. After all, who doesn’t love pasta?
Almost immediately upon entering Fancy Food, we tried what turned out to be one of our favorite sauces of the whole show. Even at 10:30 in the morning, MarRosa’s blew our socks off! While all four sauces are delicious, we’d particularly recommend the vodka sauce.
MarRosa’s is currently in 70 stores, mostly in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, but is rapidly expanding its retail presence.
While many retail pasta sauces come in jars, those of us who cook from scratch often make large quantities and freeze portions for later. After trying Frescobene, we think we’ve found a brand that has mastered freezing sauce for in-store sale!
Frescobene offers marinara, vodka, and amatriciana sauce alongside a sausage ragu, which won a SoFi award in 2018. We recommend picking up the sausage ragu or ordering online; there’s a reason it won!
Pasta aficionados know that there are many different shapes of pasta built for different sauce types. However, with hundreds of years of history, invention of new shapes is exceedingly rare.
Sfoglini, with the help of Dan Pashman, has created an innovative new shape called cascatelli (Italian for waterfalls). It almost resembles a shrimp, with a bucatini-like tube in the center and ruffled edges down the outside. When we sampled cascatelli, it lived up to the promises of “sauceability,” “forkability,” and “toothsinkability.”
HOT SAUCES AND RUBS
If you’re a hot sauce fiend, you’ve probably already seen or heard about The Truffleist. We loved their tasty hot sauce, which is gluten-free, vegan, paleo, and sugar free! Their truffle butter was to die for as well.
The hardest part of sampling hot sauces at the Hillside Harvest booth was figuring out which one was our favorite! Hillside Harvest currently sells three varieties; Pineapple Fresno, Original Hot Pepper, and Sun Kissed Tomato.
Grilling is frequently one of the hottest topics in our offices in the early summer months as the team prepares to consume copious amounts of wings, burgers, and smoked meats. At Fancy Food, we were on the hunt for rubs and sauces that would elevate our dishes.
We found that special recipe with Hogwine, which offers both a finishing sauce and a dry rub that can be used across a variety of meat products. Whether you’re cooking steak, chicken, or fish, we recommend snagging each to elevate your dishes this summer!
SALTY SNACKS
AdAdapted is headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which means that Pop Daddy’s Whitmore Lake headquarters are just minutes up the road. The company was originally founded to provide an alternative to popcorns filled with unhealthy chemicals.
The brand has since expanded its retail presence to over 4,000 locations in the United States. We tried several flavors from its burgeoning pretzel business (we recommend dill pickle, smoked gouda, and garlic parm) and based on the taste, we expect to see it in more and more stores soon!
If someone offers an AdAdapted team member a piece of jerky, they’re going to want another! That’s what happened when we stopped by the Brave Good Kind booth this year.
While it can be difficult to balance flavor and toughness when making an alternative jerky, Brave Good Kind hit the nail on the head when making their chicken bites. We loved the teriyaki and brought a few bags of the hot honey flavor back with us!
BETTER FOR YOU SNACKS
As much as we love our salty snacks, we also made sure to balance out with some better-for-you alternatives. Daily Crunch helped us get through the show with small packs of their nut and almond mixes.
Daily Crunch’s products are centered around sprouted almonds, which provide a crunchier base that’s easier to digest and has more nutrients. We chowed down on the Cherry Berry Nut Medley and pulled out the Cinnamon Java when we really needed a pick me up!
Keto is all the rage these days, and NuTrail’s nut granola fits the bill if you’re looking for a breakfast that fits the bill. Each of their products is gluten, grain, and GMO free. Most have around 2-3 grams of net carbs, 4 grams of protein, 15 grams of healthy fats, and no added sugar per serving.
Ever pick up a cookie and wonder, “what is really in this thing?” REAL Cookies created a gluten-free, grain-free, plant-based cookie that not only tastes good, but makes you feel good about the ingredients.
If you’re a chocolate chip fiend, you’ll love their offering, but we also recommend snagging the lemon blueberry!
ICE CREAM
It wouldn’t be a Fancy Food Show without ice cream, and the samples at McConnell’s helped us feel like we were at our favorite ice cream parlor. Dating back over 70 years through three generations, McConnell’s has truly mastered the craft of ice cream.
If you’re looking for something dairy-free, the passion fruit lemon swirl might be up your alley. As far as a straight ahead option goes, we can’t recommend the s’mores flavor enough!
Bellefontaine brought French style ice cream to Texas, and it might be bringing it to the rest of the country soon. The quality of ingredients were self-evident from the first spoonful across several products and left us wishing we could bring it with us on the plane home!
From the dairy-free line, we highly recommend the lemon tart sorbet, and from the dairy collection we recommend the salted butter caramel.
ALCOHOL
Hours of walking a trade show floor will have you dehydrated and yearning for happy hour. SUNBOY helped relieve us on both fronts!
SUNBOY is a canned cocktail where coconut water meets spiked seltzer. We couldn’t choose between pineapple, passion fruit, and tangerine, so we’d just recommend trying them all!
FROM SHOW FLOOR TO GROCERY STORE
We have no doubt that shoppers will be adding these favorites and many more to their grocery lists in the near future. To learn more about how to get your product added to grocery lists and online carts, email info@adadapted.com.
