Granarolo Cheese Snacks at Summer 2019 Fancy Food Show
We recently returned from the Summer 2019 Fancy Food Show in NYC. Attendance was light on Sunday when we arrived, but really picked up on Monday indicating continuing strength in the two major marketplaces covered, gourmet tchotchkes and foodservice. Here are some of the hot categories we noticed:
Cheese crisps. This baked cheese concoction, which resembles a Cheeto but contains only cheese plus magic to make it puff up, was everywhere. And why not? It’s keto and paleo friendly, carb-free and delicious. Of the many samples we tried, our favorite was Granarolo, an Italian brand. They’re not yet available in the US., so keep your eyes out for them. In the meantime, you can find a pretty decent cheese puff at Trader Joe’s (where they are called Oven-Baked Cheese Bites).
Dates!
Dates. This favorite component of energy bars is showing up in more places as well as dates as fruit marketed to consumers. (We’ll take a closer look at bars, another hot category, in a future post.) Coincidentally, Moroccan cuisine is having a moment with several vendors offering Moroccan ingredients and spice blends.
Fancy snacking crisps, a category we noted last winter, are now in wide distribution. The idea is to pack as many novelty ingredients into a thin a crisp as possible, so you can have an appealing platform for cheese or other toppings with a minimum of carbs.
Fancy snacking crisps at FFS Summer 2019
What’s not? Cheese sticks, the traditional kind, made with flour and a bit of sugar. They tasted very stale and anachronistic next to the cheese puffs. And while a visitor could formerly make a meal of pasta and pizza prepared at the show for sampling, these two categories were in short supply…. The only hot pasta on hand was at the Rao’s booth.
And, CBD. We were at the San Francisco show soon after cannabis was legalized a while back and noted there were no cannabis edibles, but this non-psychoactive form of cannabis has managed to wriggle into the culinary/natural cures mainstream. Still, there was almost none in evidence at the show. (Which might have been a prohibition from the Specialty Food Association rather than an actual lack of product.)
CBD Bites, from one of the few booths displaying CDB products.
Also, most worrisome, “I’m here because I have a great product and I’m looking for distribution” has been replaced by “if you can’t find my product locally, order it from Amazon.” Exhibiting is expensive, and if these guys are going to go direct to consumer it doesn’t bode well for the future of the show.
