Eight Things I Brought Back From the Fancy Food Show (That Made Me Say "Huh")
Eight Things I Brought Back From the Fancy Food Show (That Made Me Say "Huh")
Every day of my life runs on the same wheel. Work, exercise, sleep, the house — and somehow twenty-four hours still isn't enough to fit it all in. Same hour for work, same hour for the gym, same drive in, same drive home, six days a week, same time, same place. A squirrel on a wheel, except the squirrel knows exactly what time it is.
So at 4am on Sunday, June 28th, I left my house — fifty minutes from Hampton Beach, New Hampshire — and drove to New York alone. Exhausted and wide awake at the same time. I had the windows down, hair everywhere, singing into the fog the whole way down. By 8am I was parking on a street in Manhattan, near Koreatown, on a Sunday morning — which should have been impossible, and somehow wasn't. Thirty years in this country, and that was the first time I'd driven into Manhattan myself and parked the car myself. A small thing. It didn't feel small.
I was there for the Summer Fancy Food Show, and I didn't even know it existed until a few weeks before. It turns out this isn't a show for people like me — it's strictly B2B, industry only, and when I tried to register as a restaurant owner, I couldn't. I reached out to five companies that would be exhibiting, hoping to work a shift at one of their booths just to get a badge. All five said no. I emailed the show organizers myself, probably twenty times, just asking for a press pass, explaining I run a Korean restaurant and write about food — no reply. In the end, it was a personal connection — a friend of a friend working an exhibitor booth — who got me in. I waited for her shift, and walked onto the floor at noon.
And then the floor opened up. Booth after booth, country after country, companies I knew standing shoulder to shoulder with ones I'd never heard of. New York's famous bagel shop a few aisles from specialty goods flown in from Asia, and then, unexpectedly, home: Nongshim's Shin Ramyun, Binggrae's Melona bars, banana milk, sitting there next to everything else like they belonged, because they did.
In front of Binggrae's Melona and banana milk booth, there was a claw machine for visitors, two tries each. I lost the first one. Four hours later I came back, tried again, stopped trying to aim it carefully, and won a fat yellow pineapple plush toy purely by giving up on winning. One more small piece of happiness, won right next to the familiar names sitting among all the unfamiliar ones.
That was the day — tasting, smelling, learning more off one floor than I expected a floor could teach me. Out of 2,400 booths, eight things stopped me enough to write about. Not because they were the best-tasting or the prettiest packaging — because each one had a sentence behind it that made me go huh, a real ah-ha, not a marketing one.
Here they are.
1. Vandy Crisps — the potato chip cosplaying as a Vanderbilt
A brown bag with a top-hatted gentleman on it, holding up a single chip like he's presenting a ring. The name is short for Vanderbilt — the company leans on the old Saratoga chip legend, Cornelius Vanderbilt sending his fries back twice in 1853 until a chef sliced them paper-thin out of spite. Historians dispute the story. Vandy doesn't care. They put a Commodore on the bag and let the legend sell the chip.
Flip the bag over and the "no seed oils" pitch gets more complicated. Vandy actually has less total fat per ounce than Lay's Classic (6g vs 10g) — but double the saturated fat (3g vs 1.5g), plus 7mg of cholesterol where Lay's has none, because that's what happens the moment you trade a plant oil for an animal one. Sodium is the one place Vandy wins clean. Carbs are oddly higher — 22g against Lay's 15g — and nothing on the bag explains why.
For what it's worth, I did taste it. It's a genuinely clean, honest product — you can tell exactly what went into it. It just wasn't very delicious. Well made is not always the same thing as good.
2. Zolli Candy — the lollipop a seven-year-old invented to beat her own dentist
The banner says "CLEAN TEETH CANDY." My first reaction was the obvious one — sure, and I'm sure cigarettes cure stress.
Then I learned who's actually behind it. Alina Morse was seven years old when a bank teller offered her a lollipop and her dad said no, candy ruins teeth. Instead of accepting that, she spent two years in her kitchen — taste-testing with her own dentist — until she landed on a formula using xylitol and erythritol, sweeteners that actually raise the pH in your mouth after eating instead of lowering it. She funded the first batch with $3,750 of birthday money, her dad matched it, and by the time she was thirteen the company was doing six million dollars a year, sold in Whole Foods, Walmart, and Kroger. She's now in her early twenties and still running it.
It brought back a memory I hadn't touched in decades — every morning and night as a kid, fighting my mother over brushing my teeth. I don't want to, I'd whine, and get a few taps on the head for it, crying while I brushed anyway, telling her I hated it the whole time. She'd cheer me on with her own made-up chant the whole time — chuka-chuka, chuka-chuka — while I complained through the entire two minutes. I remember wishing, even then, that someone would just invent a candy that was actually good for your teeth. Standing at that booth as an adult, that childhood wish and this product landed in the same place at the same time, decades apart. That overlap is worth something on its own, regardless of what the candy tastes like.
3. Vermont Nut Free Chocolates — the treat built for the kid who gets nothing
A dark chocolate-covered pretzel, 140 calories for five pieces, made in a facility that's 100% peanut and tree nut free. That phrase — "100% peanut and tree nut free" — doesn't read as exciting until you picture the actual customer: a kid with a nut allergy, standing at a Halloween party or a school bake sale, watching everyone else eat chocolate while someone checks the label on theirs and says "not this one, sweetie."
This company exists so that kid doesn't have to stand there empty-handed. And it tasted like something made with real cocoa and a light hand — not too sweet, the pretzel underneath still snapping when you bit it.
Most "free-from" food marketing is about optimization — a healthier version of something you already had. This one is about access — giving someone something they were never allowed to have at all.
4. Olio Anfosso — a grandson selling his grandfather's hands
He was young — twenties, dark curls, a white shirt with the Italian flag stitched small at the collar — and he was talking with his hands the way people do when the thing they're describing is too physical for words alone. Behind him, a photograph of an older man bent over an olive tree, hands deep in the branches, and the name on the banner: Anfosso. Liguria. Chiusavecchia. Imperia.
That older man in the photo is his grandfather, who started the company. His grandfather still works the olive groves today, alongside this young man's father and uncles — three generations standing in the same rows of trees on the same hillside in Liguria, doing the same work, season after season. And the grandson, the one I was watching, doesn't stand in those rows. He flies. Food conventions, trade shows, booths like this one at the Javits Center, explaining to strangers in a language his grandfather may not even speak what those hands in the photograph are actually doing.
I've spent most of my life watching people perform — what's rehearsed, what's real, what's a son trying to live up to a father. There was nothing performed about this. He wasn't selling olive oil. He was translating his family's labor into a language the rest of the world could buy. Every bottle on that glass shelf, every jar of Taggiasca olives stacked behind him, was something his grandfather's hands had touched before his ever did. He just happens to be the one standing in an airport instead of an olive grove this generation.
That's the real cost of a family business surviving three generations — somebody has to leave the land to go sell what the land made. He didn't say it that way. He didn't have to. The photograph behind him said it for him. And when I tasted the oil, it backed him up — the kind of flavor that only shows up when the people pressing it actually grew the trees themselves.
Two things I just liked
Not every booth needs a theory behind it. These two earned their spot on the list just by being honest.
5. Matchaful — the matcha company born from a failed grocery run
The story on the back of the granola bag: the founders went looking for a clean matcha granola — no refined sugar, no grain filler — and couldn't find one. So they made it themselves, first by hand in a small SoHo café. The matcha itself, called Hikari, comes from a single farm in Shizuoka, Japan, run by the same family for four generations.
200 calories a serving, 15g fat, 9g sugar (4g of it added) — not a diet food, and it doesn't pretend to be one. What it's selling is traceability: you can follow this matcha back to one farm, one family, instead of a blended supply chain with no name attached.
The product wasn't built to fill a market gap. It was built because the founders personally couldn't buy what they wanted, which is a much harder story to fake.
The matcha itself was nothing like what you'd find at a regular store — a more refined fragrance, a deeper color. It reminded me of tea leaves catching hard summer sunlight, that particular shade of green that only shows up under strong light.
6. Painterland Sisters — yogurt that tastes like it cost someone something
I tasted it before I read a single word on the booth, and the first thing I thought wasn't healthy. It was rich — thick in a way that coats the spoon, deep in a way most yogurt simply isn't. That's not an accident, and it's not a stabilizer either.
This is skyr, made the way it's made in Iceland: it takes about four cups of milk, slowly strained, to make one small cup of this yogurt. Most American "high protein" yogurts spin theirs through a centrifuge to force the water out fast. Painterland Sisters doesn't — they strain it the old, patient way, which is exactly why it tastes like something instead of nothing.
The two women behind it, Hayley and Stephanie Painter, are sisters running their family's fourth-generation dairy farm in rural Pennsylvania. A few years ago, the math on that farm stopped working — milk prices kept falling, and a small organic dairy can't compete on volume with an industrial one. Rather than sell the land, the sisters built a yogurt company to save it, and partnered with an Icelandic co-manufacturer whose own family has been making skyr for ten generations. Two family lineages, half a world apart, both trying to keep something alive past their own lifetimes — and somehow it ended up working.
It was thick the way Greek yogurt is thick, but somehow smoother, deeper, richer than any Greek yogurt I've had. It was the first time I'd tasted anything quite like it. I hope this kind of yogurt makes it into regular supermarkets someday, so more people get to eat something this good and this healthy without having to hunt for it at a trade show.
If there was one feeling underneath all eight of these, it's this: there are still companies, still people, who want to make something good and sell it as itself. Not engineered around a trend, not hollowed out to hit a margin — they put their own pride into it. Their own character. The thing on the shelf is, in some small way, them.
It's a kind of stubbornness, and I mean that as a compliment. The good kind — the kind that refuses to cut a corner even when cutting it would be easier and cheaper. That's what makes food taste both good and honest at the same time. I stood there tasting things made by people who'd poured themselves into them, stubborn on purpose, and I could tell.
A lot of the companies at this show brought exactly that kind of pride with them — their own name staked on what was in the bag. I hope more of them end up on the shelf right next to the big corporations, not tucked away in a specialty aisle somewhere. The more people who get to stand in front of that shelf and actually know what they're choosing, the better.
I could feel it before I could explain it. Standing there tasting things, watching people talk about what they'd made — something in my chest filled up, small as it sounds, and I just smiled. Not because anything was clever. Because it was good, and it made me happy, and I could tell it had made someone else happy first, long before it ever got to me.
I still have that pineapple.
It sits on my desk now, the one I only won because I stopped trying to aim for it. Most days I don't even see it anymore — it's just there, next to the keyboard, holding down a stack of papers it was never built to hold. But some mornings, before the six-day wheel starts turning again, I catch it out of the corner of my eye and remember exactly why it's ugly and I love it.
That's the whole trip, really, in one dumb yellow toy. Eight booths out of 2,400 gave me the same feeling — something a little imperfect, made by someone who meant it, handed to a stranger anyway. I drove home with a car full of that.
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