The Tastemakers (21 page)

The reality was that in a massive space packed with potential products and nascent food trends, the list of sofi nominations provided beleaguered buyers with a curated cheat sheet. “When we walk through this show, a sofi is an eye-catching thing for a buyer,” said Kim Kristopher, senior channel director of specialty retail with KeHE, the largest supermarket wholesale distributor on the continent as well as a member of the sofi judging panel that year. “Something had to be intriguing for them to even be nominated, which is why the nominees are kind of a must-have list. You hit all those big items to make sure you see those items validated by leaders in the industry.” KeHE represented mainstream grocery chains like
Supervalu, and for them, having the seal of approval from a sofi win or even nomination made picking up a specialty food and committing to a trend far less risky. “It highlights demand for that segment,” Kristopher told me as her army of buyers surrounded her in KeHE's pavilion. “When a goat cheese product wins, it says, ‘Hey, goat cheese won. So let's look at that segment.' ” A few years ago sofis were won by chipotle-flavored chocolates and sea salt caramels, both of which have since become mainstream grocery items.

O
n the night of the award ceremony, as the nominees walked down the red carpet to the audience's applause, a mime in a skintight silver bodysuit, dressed as a sofi award, poked around the crowd. After a rambling keynote speech by noted chef José Andrés that included anecdotes about serving Iberico ham in the Spanish navy and a screed during which he called inflexible locavores the “Spanish Inquisition of the fancy food industry” and also its “Taliban,” the gold sofis were handed out. What was incredible was how emotional the evening quickly became. The mushroom frat boys from Back to the Roots pumped their fists and bounded around stage while Majid Mahjoub, a humble Tunisian farmer who won for his exquisite hand-rolled couscous, dedicated the award to his country's citizens and villagers who had ignited the Arab Spring just a year before. More than a few winners became visibly choked up when they took to the microphone, including a San Francisco sorbet company's founder who practically bawled his eyes out on stage.

When the nominees were announced in the confection category Farrell and Conrad were sitting together, their hands clenched. When their name was announced as the winners they seemed stunned for a second, then rose to embrace. “Our goats are going to be really excited about this,” Conrad said, holding the award aloft like the Superbowl trophy when she took to the podium. “They find all shiny objects irresistible.”

“It's just nice to come down from the mountain and be surrounded by nongoats,” Farrell said, bringing a laugh from the crowd.

Tomorrow their booth would be swarmed with buyers and interested well-wishers, ranging from regional Whole Foods representatives to the editor of Oprah's magazine and even their state's senator, Patrick Leahy. Over the coming months sales at Big Picture Farms would quadruple, with a dozen new accounts arriving in the following weeks and more than fifty following up by the end of the year, including the upscale bakery chain Le Pain Quotidien. Their caramels would be featured in the
New York Times
and a number of other publications, and the clothing chain Anthropologie would place an order for a 180,000 caramels to sell at all their stores over the holidays, which would make Big Picture Farms a profitable company several years before Farrell and Conrad had projected. They would buy their farm, better milking and wrapping equipment, and, crucially, more goats. Their products would reach thousands more mouths, and their success would inspire others to begin making goat's milk caramels, perhaps even jump-starting a new mini-economy of goat's milk caramels that were once an isolated experiment on a small Vermont farm and then, just a few years later, could be found on the shelves of every supermarket in the country.

But that night, as they sat back down at their table, none of that had happened yet. Instead, Conrad sat there with her gold sofi award, beaming from ear to ear as she snapped photographs of it with her phone, pausing between shots to look admiringly at pictures of her goats.

S
ix months after the sofi awards I was in San Francisco for the Winter Fancy Food Show, the West Coast version of the summer trade fair, which tends to be a bit smaller and more focused on companies from the region. I was also recovering from the flu, which had hit me like a ton of bricks three days before, and I spent the show drinking as many samples of green tea as I could while alternating bites of food and cough drops. On the show's last afternoon I headed into a dimly lit conference room and took a seat at the end of a long table, surrounded by ten women, plus myself, Louise Kramer, and Ron Tanner, the VP of communications for the Specialty Food Association. Tanner set down a cardboard box on the table and began pulling out half a dozen bottles of open wine, samples from the show that, everyone agreed, shouldn't go to waste. The television chef, cookbook author, and all-around culinary legend Sara Moulton began pouring the wines into little paper coffee cups.

“What about you, David?” she asked.

“I'm trying to get over the flu,” I coughed from the other end of the table, where I'd distanced myself from the nearest person by a good eight feet.

“Okay, then,” Moulton said. “I'll just pour you some rosé. Nothing's better for the flu than rosé.”

Tanner thanked everyone for participating in this trends panel, which happens at the end of every show. The goal was to tap seasoned food trend spotters' observations in order to pull together a succinct summary of the top food trends that emerged from the show, and these would be condensed into a press release and sent out to the media the next day. Suzie Timm, a manicured Phoenix-area food events consultant who blogged at
girlmeetsfork.com
, kicked off with her thoughts. She saw a trend called “blue cheese redux,” with blue cheeses appearing in unexpected places, like a blue cheese seasoning powder, and a “cha-cha-chai,” with the Indian spiced tea blend being used to flavor maraschino cherries and biscotti shortbread. “I brought an Indian friend with me, and she approved of all the chai products,” Timm said with great confidence.

Stephanie Stevitti, a culinary journalist who had authored a book about macaroni and cheese and contributed regularly to National Public Radio, noticed a lot of small Italian-style cakes, several boozy jams (including a pepper spread with Irish whiskey), and chipotle-flavored products everywhere. “I saw more coconut than anything else, and Indian,” Moulton said, adding a loud snore for effect, as she named dozens of Indian food products she'd seen at the show. “Some trends seem to go on and on and on. Yeah, just a lot of Indian.” Joanne Weir, a Bay Area chef and cookbook author, found a few gluten-free foods that were now edible, compared to the sawdust of years past, and noticed a lot of chia products edging out flax seeds as well as single-origin oils in a variety of herbal flavors. Nancy Hopkins, the food editor at
Better Homes and Gardens
was caught by vinegar-pickled fruits (like white balsamic–pickled pineapple), grass-fed milk, and organic Greek frozen yogurt, which she predicted would be a “game changer.”

Then the floor turned to Kara Nielsen, who had been reviewing pages and pages of handwritten notes, and hundreds of photos she'd taken over the past few days. Nielsen's presence commanded everyone's attention. At this point she worked nearby at the Center for Culinary Development, a corporate food think tank that provided innovative product solutions to the food business (she would later move to Iconoculture, a consumer trends company). Her title
was trendologist, and she knew more about food trends than anyone in the room and, likely, the country. “I'm also excited about blue cheese,” Nielsen said, noting powdered blue cheese in a bagged popcorn and blue cheese–flavored Dijon mustard. Veggies were appearing in new places, including teas, ice pops, and even as part of pressed fruit snacks. “I'm seeing South American beyond just Peruvian,” Nielsen added, with Argentinean chimichurri-flavored marinades and products jumping out this year, though Peru's aji amarillo pepper had still been growing in stature, an observation that would have brought great joy to Ricardo Zarate. “Pistachios have totally popped, and the Pistachio Council has done a great job. It's not just a snack anymore.” Chia seed was also spreading out, appearing in pastas, candy bars, and new drinks.

After everyone had gone around the table, Kramer recapped their observations and then read the list of trends that had come out of last year's Winter Fancy Food Show, including Pickling 2.0, Gluten-Free Grows Up, Coconut Cracks, and Ancient Grains. Everyone realized much of what they'd been discussing was a rehash of the year before, and the room let out a collective groan. “There's no trends!” Stevitti said with mock horror. “Oh god!” Moulton echoed, to laughter. Tanner then began to shape a unified message. “I heard a lot today about herby drinks, like vegetable teas,” he said. “We could say ‘Drink Your Vegetables.' ”

“We could call it Botanical Beverages,” Timm suggested, to everyone's approval. At the end of the hour the group had a list of the five top trends from the show: Oil Nouveau, Blue Cheese Redux, So Many Seeds, Top Banana, and Botanical Beverages. These went into a press release, each with three examples of products that had appeared at the show, and the next day the story had already been picked up by
USA Today
and the
New York Times
in addition to other news sites, blogs, and food industry websites, some of which published their own trend lists from the show based on their correspondents' observations.

This short exercise was a rare public view into the world of food trend predictions and forecasting, a small, highly influential subset of the food industry that has grown alongside the prominence of
food trends. Increasingly, trend forecasting is becoming a crucial activity for food companies, as the explosion of food culture has not only stimulated the interest of consumers but also accelerated the rate at which it changes. Whereas independent restaurant chefs and small food companies can quickly release products based on their own taste and instinct, the large, publicly traded corporations who operate restaurant chains and manufacture potato chips are much slower-moving creatures. Ricardo Zarate can have an idea at lunch, and it will be on Picca's menu by dinner. Lucas Farrell and Louisa Conrad can cook up a batch of coffee caramels on a Monday, tweak the recipe over the course of the week, and start selling them to customers by Friday. But for companies like Pepsico or Denny's, the innovation cycle takes years.

Ideas are brainstormed, prototyped, kitchen tested, debated within dozens of boardrooms, tested in select markets, subjected to refinements and focus groups, prepared for a launch, advertised to the public, and slowly rolled out store by store, state by state, and country by country. The time line from the initial idea for a food to a consumer's first bite can be months in the quickest moving companies and years for the largest ones, with the whole process costing many millions of dollars. Furthermore, the product development teams and executives in these companies often aren't on the cutting edge of culinary tastes. Most big food companies are located far from trendy culinary centers in New York, Paris, or Tokyo. More often they are found in suburban office parks in the American Midwest. Though the executives in these companies are skilled in data analysis, marketing skills, and business development, most in the mainstream food world do not know their buffalo milk mozzarella from their fior de latte. I have a cousin who works for a large processed food company in Canada and is in charge of their Chinese food brand's marketing. She has never once tasted the food she sells because she happens to keep kosher, but she is extremely good at her job, and the truth is that being a gourmand is not part of her work requirement.

Those in the mainstream food industry tend to find out about food trends at the same time as the rest of us—when it's already too
late. This creates a problem because these same companies need to take advantage of the potential sales and interest food trends can generate, and the sooner they can release products that tap into those trends, the better. If they wait to find out about the trends by themselves, their products will hit the market years after the trend has already passed, like a fashion label debuting a line of bell bottom jeans in 1982. Large food companies are driven by a need to innovate and stay current, but paradoxically, the scale of their development process and its costs tend to make them extremely risk averse. On the one hand, they want to be cutting edge, but on the other, they need to stay safe enough that they won't squander millions of dollars on what turns out to be a quickly passing fad. They don't jump into food trends lightly.