by David Sax
Most countries seemed almost to be courting their national stereotypes, especially the Europeans. The United Kingdom booth was set up with understated displays of shortbread cookies, cheddars, and other finger foods from her majesty’s island, accented by a pile of Wales/USA friendship flag pins. Germany’s precision engineering was on display in perfect arrangements of Ritter Sport chocolates and erectly postured trade representatives sitting in sharply tailored suits and with modern, angular glasses. The financial crisis hadn’t really affected the Greeks, whose bounty of olives, oils, and stuffed grape leaves attracted constant activity as other Greeks popped by for samples like it was a village market. Next in store was Italy, usually the strongest pavilion in the hall of nations (the Italians basically established the specialty food market in America), with the country’s gorgeous men and women sporting pristine suits as they poured out shots of limoncello and carved huge chunks off parmesan wheels. Then, on Sunday afternoon, when it was time for Italy to play Ireland in the Euro Cup, all the men disappeared to a booth in the rear with a large television, leaving their women, once again, to do all the work.
Portugal’s austerity in the wake of the Euro crisis must have had an impact on their presence, because they ended up with one unaffiliated booth decorated with a homemade flag—even the Palestinians outdid them. No one in Africa or the Middle East outdid Morocco, however. Among that country’s plushly carpeted lounges was a bevy of TVs that didn’t show anything and several ornate fountains like you would find in the courtyard of a palace but dispensing fresh pear juice. The Japanese, it seemed, were out to create a parody of Japaneseness, with samples of sake, beer, and kangaroo-shaped cookies displayed like objects in a museum. Many of their vendors wore traditional robes, and the whole Japanese pavilion was being filmed, constantly, by enthusiastic Japanese TV crews. Thankfully, they weren’t too close to their South Korean rivals, who brought their Fancy Food A-game, offering up freshly fried persimmon jam–stuffed donuts, bulgogi sliders, and flavored dry seaweed snacks thrust into every hand and bag from promoters who fanned out all around the show.
By far my favorite section belonged to China, simply for its sheer disconnect with the audience at the Fancy Food Show. Despite China’s glorious food culture, its booth seemed to reflect almost no taste at all. The largest international contingent by far, spread out over four separate areas, China’s delegation featured companies with incongruous names like Ningbo Glory International Corporation and Shaanxi Yiyexuan Ecology and Science and Technology Co. Ltd., all of whom occupied tables and chairs in sparse booths. These were decorated with photographs of factories and stock pictures of food products (grains of rice, a tanker ship), additives, and, in one case, a tribute to Lei Feng, apparently a People’s Liberation Army hero and icon of the Chinese Communist Party who died at twenty-two when he was struck by a falling telephone pole and was so beloved by the booth’s sponsor that he had dedicated his entire space to him despite the fact that Feng had absolutely no connection to food whatsoever. Chinese samples were sparse and unappetizing—a few nuts in a bowl or some unlabeled candies—though my favorite was a large baking sheet, covered in tomato paste, with a single plastic spoon resting in it. “Please,” the tray practically beckoned, “enjoy all the tomato paste from Ghanzhou Trading and Chemical Corporation you can eat. Now 98 percent formaldehyde-free.”
In Ecuador’s brightly colored area I met up with David Bermeo, who had recently taken over his family’s fragrance and ingredient business, which had lost its biggest account when Nestlé moved its regional soup production to Chile. Bermeo had repositioned Terrafertil to exclusively sell dried fruits and was here at the Fancy Food Show to talk up the potential of the goldenberry. Grown in the Andes and also known as the uvilla, or Peru cherry, goldenberries are best known as the deep yellow, perfectly round, tart fruits with the papery husk that regularly garnish molten chocolate cakes and other wedding desserts. Bermeo believed that dried goldenberries had the market potential to become the next cranberry, and he saw his company’s future as a goldenberry version of Ocean Spray, sold under the name Nature’s Heart. Terrafertil already owned 90 percent of the world’s goldenberry market share, but people weren’t going to buy them in the volume he wanted unless they believed goldenberries were good for them. In other words, Bermeo needed to create a health trend. Already they had hired PR firms in the UK to pitch the goldenberry to press, and in 2011 Dr. Oz had mentioned it on his show. That had raised awareness in the United States significantly, and sales had tripled since, which is why Bermeo was here, trying to capitalize on that momentum. “You can spend millions on PR for these products,” he said, pointing out one of the roving teams handing out Korean seaweed snacks, “and it still tastes like seawater. In agricultural products it’s not like selling iPhones. You want to take it step by step.”
Every exhibitor at the show, whether they were mom-and-pop startups like Big Picture farms or international market leaders like Twinings Tea, were there to attract the attention of the tastemakers in attendance. These include restaurant consultants, corporate chefs, and distributors. There were also representatives from large food corporations, such as Kraft and Proctor and Gamble, who came to encounter the latest trends, assess potential companies they could acquire, and find ideas that they could emulate. The show is covered by hundreds of reporters ranging from mainstream culinary magazines like Food & Wine and Martha Stewart Living to national outlets like CBS, NPR, and the New York Times as well as plenty of trade industry publications, including Food Safety Magazine and Candy Industry. Overwhelmingly the most important and numerous tastemakers at the show are the buyers from grocery stores. They walk the aisles, looking for new products and ideas, almost as though they were cruising their own stores with a shopping cart, plucking the latest trends off the shelves.
As I waited to enter the show on the first morning, I bumped into Sergio Hernandez, an acquaintance who owns BKLYN Larder, a small but well-known specialty food store in Brooklyn. On the train ride down from New York that morning Hernandez had gone through the list of vendors with his partner, Francie Stephens, flagging those they already sold and those they were interested in checking out, based around products they needed in certain categories (e.g., a new chocolate or olive oil). “Once we get inside, we start walking the aisles,” Hernandez said, setting off toward an Italian importer to taste a dozen fruit vinegars. Omnivorousness was helpful, but Hernandez had to be discerning. “You can systematically walk up and down every single aisle, but you’ll be exhausted and taste stuff you don’t like.” Later on I met up with Ari Weinzweig, one of the cofounders of Zingerman’s, a specialty food empire in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who had been coming to the show for thirty years, looking for the full-flavored, traditional foods his stores, restaurants, and national mail-order business built its reputation on. “With the web and e-mail, this show is a lot easier to navigate,” Weinzweig said, striding briskly through the aisles on his long legs. As he went by, people called out to him from booths left and right, and occasionally he’d stop to grab a sample or take a small bite, but most of the time he just kept on moving. “My method is to start on one end and take notes till I run out of time. You have to suspend all eating convention. It’s not a good way to do it, but it is the only way to do it.” Finally, he planted his feet at the booth of Taza Chocolate, a Massachusetts company that specialized in Mexican-style stone-ground chocolates. “Where’s the salt and pepper one?” Weinzweig asked the woman behind the booth. “I’ve tried it before, but I want to try it again, even though I sell their stuff. With chocolate, you have to taste it, because like olive oil, everyone pretty much says the same thing to describe their product.” Companies will tell Weinzweig something is “artisanal” and “traditional” and “handcrafted,” but rarely do they actually tell him how it tastes. The salt-and-pepper chocolate tasted just as you’d expect … like you’d sprinkled salt and pepper on a good-quality chocolate bar, which was too jarring and confusing for me, but Weinzweig swore t
here were people who wanted that.
Each buyer on the floor was out there, tasting and sampling and schmoozing so they could identify the next trend that would appeal to their customer base. People like Hernandez and Weinzweig looked for small, independent producers who could offer completely unique tastes, because the people who shopped in their stores were the most educated, affluent food consumers in the country, and they expected to consistently be wowed by what was out there. At the other end of the spectrum, wearing branded polo shirts and crisp pleated slacks, were buyers from national supermarket chains and big-box retailers like Wegmans, Costco, and Walmart. As mainstream tastes grew more complex and sophisticated over the past several decades these stores had begun offering more variety in their grocery shelves with specialty foods. Although wealthy gourmands do shop at Costco and Walmart, their average buyer at their checkout counters tends to pick up on food trends much later in the cycle. That’s why sea salt caramels will first appear in a small specialty market like BKLYN Larder years before you can buy them in a big tub at Costco. In the years that trend takes to trickle down, it will move from online and farmer’s market sales to a selection of regional specialty food stores, then smaller chains until the trend is poised to enter the final stage before reaching the mass market: Whole Foods.
The Austin, Texas–based premium grocery chain is the key bridge between the niche market of independent specialty food producers and big-box grocery. Its importance in the evolutionary cycle of food trends is hard to exaggerate. Whole Foods works with small companies, helping them scale their business to supply larger markets while also providing the type of exposure that’s impossible to buy. If you can get your product in Whole Foods, you’re now on the ground floor of mainstream taste. If you can’t crack Whole Foods, your trend is likely dead in the water. “The holy grail of this show is Whole Foods,” said Hernandez as we walked around, tasting more olive oils. “So many of these food producers specifically create a product made for Whole Foods.” Independent stores, like BKLYN Larder, won’t even carry a product if it’s already in Whole Foods—it has already become too mainstream for both the shop’s discerning owners and their customers. Whole Foods divides its stores into eleven geographic regions (Northwest, NYC metro area, Pacific Northwest, etc.), and each of those regions purchase their products independently. This allows stores to source produce, meat, and fish locally, keeping with the company’s sustainable ethos, but also it lets Whole Foods test out products one market at a time—as happened with Mamma Chia’s drinks—allowing them to slowly build up a supply chain while also seeing how customers react. For the producers at the Fancy Food Show, the appearance at their booth of someone bearing a Whole Foods identity badge is a moment pregnant with promise. At the Fancy Food Show a dozen or so buyers from the different regions were walking the floor at all times, and though they were free to pick up any accounts they liked, they were under the watchful eye of the company’s head global cheese and specialty product buyer, Cathy Strange, likely the most powerful tastemaker at the Fancy Food Show.
Strange met me the second morning of the show next to the entrance to the large basement exhibit hall. She is tall, broad shouldered, and was dressed in a billowy lavender shirt, worn jeans, and running shoes (she wears a different pair each day of the show). Strange has the strong hands and wide dimpled smile of a dairy farmer, which made sense, as she is basically the queen of American cheese. A native of North Carolina, Strange was selling wine for a local Durham, North Carolina, specialty market in 1991 when Whole Foods acquired it. She quickly moved through the company’s ranks, first regionally and then nationally, eventually becoming the buyer in charge of cheese around the world, picked for her keen ability to recognize international food trends before they broke. Over the years she has headed up the American Cheese Society, made nearly every different type of cheese herself, and toured hundreds of dairies from Wisconsin to the Italian countryside, searching for the next cheese, chocolate, olive, or other specialty food trend that will resonate with Whole Foods customers. When Strange makes a pick, a trend begins its move into the big time, and her choices resonate so deeply in the industry that they not only shape the way other retailers buy food but also the way food is made, packaged, and sold around the world. As Anna Wintour is to clothing and Harvey Weinstein is to film, Strange is to gouda.
As Strange and I walked down the aisles of the show, heads began turning. Some people stared and turned their voices to hushed whispers while others shamelessly leaped over their tables, thrusting forth a handshake, a sample, or a business card at Strange. The attention was relentless. “When I’m at this show, it’s like being J-Lo,” Strange joked as she waved and thanked people and said hello without ever breaking stride or stopping longer than a beat. It was like watching a seasoned politician work a rope line at a campaign event—she was a pro. “I’m looking for colors,” Strange said as I struggled to keep up, “how something’s merchandised, what’s hot, and how it would work with Whole Foods. Just flashes of it.” Walking down an aisle, Strange would glance right, then left as she moved along, like a driver scanning the stores on either side of the street without ever stopping her car. “The way I tackle this is divide and conquer. I go row by row, see something, pull a card, write a note, or take a picture.” Strange was constantly holding up her phone, shooting short videos with a small camera, and writing down notes on paper. “I’ll look at a booth for half a second and make a snap decision. When something doesn’t catch my eye I’m through there like a north wind.” Like Hernandez and other independents, Strange wanted that undiscovered gem—the next trend before anyone even realized it—and she wanted it all to herself. Whole Foods signed producers up to an exclusivity contract for a period of time so that their food would only be available in their stores and not at other major grocers. “If Safeway has it, forget it,” she said.
We charged through half the show in an hour, tasting smoked blue cheese from Oregon’s Rogue Creamery, a creamy bouche from Vermont Butter and Cheese Creamery, incredibly delicate sauerkraut from the Champagne region, the dapper Spaniard Figueroa’s minitorta sheep’s milk cheese, buttery Lucque olives from Languedoc, France, and a rosemary-infused honey from the quirky little Thistle Dew Farm in West Virginia. At one point Strange was flagged down and corralled for a second by someone she knew at Atalanta, a large importer that had set up next to the Peruvian pavilion. “Cathy! Cathy!” he said, grabbing her arm and pulling her over, “I want to show you something.” In his hand he held a tiny red pepper, shaped like a teardrop and no bigger than an almond. It was called a Sweety Drop, and the company was the exclusive importer of this new pepper, which had been recently discovered in Peru’s jungles. Strange was intrigued. She snapped some photos of the Sweety Drop, took a video of the importer talking about its attributes, jotted a few notes, and finally popped one in her mouth. “I like it,” she said, after three or four bites. “It has a great taste. It’s that sweet and spicy that Americans like. Visually it’s very appealing.” Strange then started asking questions: Did anyone else carry it? Was there distribution already? Packaging? Marketing? As the importer answered, Strange held her chin and nodded. “Okay,” she said, “let’s get some samples and packaging. Send them for fall to representatives from all eleven regions.” The Atalanta folks could barely hide their joy and began pulling out other products for Strange to try, but she was already on the move, bound to sniff out the next trend.
“At the end of the day I want the Whole Foods customer to walk away remembering the product,” Strange said when I asked her what the end goal was. “Food is sensory. It’s a visual thing. You’ll remember the smell when you bite down on that pepper just there, you’ll remember the flavors as they linger in the mouth.” At our last stop together, she encountered a beeswax cheese from Spain that was creamy, sweet, and mellow. “Do you feel that?” Strange asked, cracking the round of cheese open like a crusty bread, handing me half, and inhaling deeply. “The texture! And the floral notes! These
are the gems you look for!”
After Strange and I parted ways I headed upstairs to a brightly lit room where the sofi nominees were being judged. Any retailer or journalist attending the show was free to cast their votes, and when I entered, samples of all the nominated products were spread out along three chest-height tables that spanned the length of the room. Half a dozen catering staff dressed in cheap rental tuxedos circled around the entries, serving samples that required more care, such as bowls of Hard Times chili and Elena’s Mediterranean Stew (nominees in the Soup, Stew Bean, or Chili category), or just making sure the judges didn’t double dip. Overseeing all of it was Louise Kramer, the Specialty Food Association’s wonderful communications director, who explained how the process began months before.