Natural Food Expo March, 2015 Part 1

Every year that Phil has been and exhibitor at the Natural Food Show in Anaheim, I have been there.  Not only is it a chance for me to spend an hour with him, but it's an opportunity to see what's new in the food industry.  This was the first year that Evol was part of the Boulder Brands booth.  They had a huge booth, and were sampling mac and cheese and burritos.  Their other brands, Udi's and Smart Balance, were also sampling a variety of foods.  I'm not much of a fan of gluten free anything, but Udi's has a new bread that is absolutely delicious.  Smart Balance is now making peanut butter, and they were sampling that.  After visiting with Phil for a while, my mom and I went off on a three hour trek of the rest of the 70,000  booths.  Here's a sampling of what we saw and what I found new in natural foods.

Chia.  It's everywhere.  My favorite product is Mamma Chia, a drink company with flavors like mango, coconut and berry, with chia seeds in the drink.  The seeds expand in liquid, so you get a full feeling from drinking a healthy fruit drink with chia seeds.  The seeds are soft and you swallow them whole, and after drinking a bottle of Mama Chia's fruit drink you feel full.  I loved them.  Flax seeds.  It's found in so many products.  Flax 4 Life makes a muffin with flax seed that is pretty good.  Flax seeds are added to cereal protein bars, crackers and cookies.  Beans are also present in many food products that you normally wouldn't think of as containing beans.  For example, a  new cereal company based in Denver called Mighty Flakes, has several varieties of bean based cereals.  They were good.  They have a flake, a Cherrio type cereal, and another cereal with coconut and nuts in it.  This is a great product and I hope they do well. Another bean product comes from The Good Bean.  They make protein snacks from beans, like chips and crackers.  They also make a Thai coconut lemon grass snack which was delicious.  It tasted like nuts, but was made from beans.

I mentioned Mighty Flakes cereal company, but there were more than a dozen other cereal companies, all vying to be noticed.  Peace Cereal makes a product called Quinoa chia crunch.  They make a coconut chia almond cereal, a buckwheat hemp, and blueberry pomegranate.  Many of the new breakfast cereals are gluten free.

Kamut is another seldom used grain that showed up often.  Kamut is similar to couscous, but a little nuttier.  We sampled a cold salad made with kamut, sliced apples, vinegar, scallions and a little mayo.  It was like a cole slaw dressing with kamut and apples.  I loved it.

There were many more products that we sampled, and I will write one more blog about some other specific products that I particularly liked.  I will say that I didn't notice anything really new.  Ancient grains are popular, as a supplements like flax seed and chia seed.  Seaweed is very popular, goat milk is found is numerous butters, cheeses and milk.  There were a number of hemp products, and whether or not those products are sold only in states like Colorado and Washington that allow the smoking and growing of marijuana, I do not know, but there were a number of products containing hemp.  Since I had a long drive home, I refrained from sampling the hemp products.  More next week.