Natural Food Expo Part 11

More food finds from the natural food show included Theo, a chocolate company.  They make a salted almond bar, lemon chocolate bar, and raspberry coconut bar, just to name a few.  I'm not a chocolate lover, but I tried the salted almond bar, and it was delicious.  They have bars in milk and dark chocolate.  Perfect Sense, which I mentioned in my last blog, also makes side dishes using kamut with chia and lentils.  Sadly, there were no samples available.  Everyone knows and loves Stacey's, who make delicious pita chips.  Now add bagel chips and pretzel thins to their line of products.  I loved the bagel chips.  They're great to eat right out of the bag, or with a dip.  Light Life is another company making plant based meat.  They were sampling sausage.  It looked like the real thing, and if I hadn't know it wasn't sausage, I never would have guessed.

We were getting tired at this point, so we went back to the Boulder Brands booth, where they had chairs and even a couch to relax on.  We spent 5 minutes with Phil before he dashed off to a meeting, and then took a short rest.  Our bags were full, so we left them at the booth, and started anew with empty bags.  We stopped at Food Should Taste Good, a company making chips.  Multigrain, guacamole, jalapeno and sweet potato were just some of the varieties, all excellent.  Kind, my favorite energy bar, is now making breakfast bars and more varieties of energy bars.  Pineapple coconut, cherry apple, apricot pear and banana pineapple with kale and spinach are some of their new products.  Crofters makes organic spreads like jam, that are so tasty.  Cherry mango and blackberry strawberry are just two of their delicious flavors.

Tates cookies have developed several new cookies.  Look for them in your supermarket.  They are sooo good.  Grecian Delights is a Greek food companies making swirls in apple and cinnamon and cheese and spinach.  they little straws that are flavored and swirled.  They make a great appetizer.  Additionally, they make tzadaki and Greek yogurt dip.  A new drink called BLK, is like a black lemonade.  Something in the process turns it black, and it looks very strange.  It tastes like lemonade, but it's black.  They say it is loaded with anti oxidants.  Stoneyfield yogurt was sampling some new flavors.  I tried a whole milk plain with honey.  It was fantastic.  We all agreed this was the best yogurt we had eaten all day.  The last product I want to tell you about is from a company called Pitaya +.  The base of the product is dragon fruit mixed with other ingredients.  It's in a powdered form, and is mixed with other ingredients to make a smoothie.  It was delicious and the most beautiful bright pink color imaginable.  It is used by companies like Jamba Juice as the base of their smoothies, but is also available to the public.

I saw many pickle companies this year, and other companies making pickled or fermented vegetables.  One was fermenting beets, kim chi and cabbage.  This is an acquired taste, but pickling and fermenting are getting popular.  Coconut continues to be popular in water, tea and lemonade drinks.  Unusual grains like kamut and spelt are also popular.  Seaweed seems to have waned.  I don't think I saw any seaweed products.  Bacon also seemed to be absent from anything I saw.  Snack crackers and energy bars are very popular, and yogurt, with different flavors and additions is more popular than ever.  Natural foods are here to stay.  Buzz words like GMO and locally sourced abound.  People are willing to pay a little more to know what they're eating.  Until next year, that's all from the Natural Food Expo.




The picture on this blog is of the number of plastic bags ONE person uses over the course of a year.  I thought this display made quite a statement.