Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Summer Fancy Food Show Day 2! (Electric Boogaloo!) 40+ photos!

People rushing around near the entrance by the North Hall. Some super-human-women wore heels the entire convention!
I'm safe and sound back in Jersey. Now that I'm back at my PC I can't will myself to release the rest of my day one photos without some photo retouching. I got too snap-happy with my camera and never changed the settings. They were still set on my custom white balance from my photo-set up here at home, so while I get those ready, I'm skipping ahead to day 2 which had MUCH better lighting! 
Day 2 is my BIGGEST day with the most ground to cover. Day 1 I covered every aisle of level 1, and on day 2 I had to cover all of level 3. Just to give you an idea of how big the 3rd level main-room is, here is the map.
Just so you know, this map is a 4-page spread! That's right, 4-8.5"x11" pages worth of booths and tables! I walked through nearly every aisle, skipping a few that dealt with foreign cooking ingredients that were looking for American retailers. As a member of the press I can't really help those guys out.
Check out my other Summer Fancy Food Show Coverage Posts! 

To start the day, a little shot of delicious, cold, Villa Massa limoncello.  Breakfast of Italian champions!
Cheese bowl...filled with cheese. This is a thing of beauty...
Toothpicks? Just give me a spoon! <3 I'm usually not a food snob, but when it comes to cheese? Pinkies out!
Beautiful illuminated cases showing off an interesting new product...Bob Pop! It's like caramel corn...but not corn at all!
Multigrain Bob Pop caramel snacks have all the lightness and flavor of a caramel corn, but it's healthier and there are absolutely NO kernels. This stuff was VERY addicting and delicious. It's an interesting product that tastes great and their booth showcased their process and machinery. It's always cool to get a little behind the scenes look at products like these.

After walking several aisles, and the humid streets of NY because my stubborn self didn't want to pay for an Uber or a taxi, Serendipity Frozen Hot Chocolate was a sight for sore eyes.
Their little samples were a cool chocolatey oasis on that exhausting showroom floor! I could have drank a whole tray's worth, but there was a LOT more showroom floor to cover.  This tiny cup will have to do. Very rich, and chocolate pudding-pop-like.

Another gorgeous display! This one was for a booth giving away samples of jack-fruit and fresh sliced coconut. I'm a sucker for interesting photo opportunities.

Hello big, beautiful, spreadable cheese. How you doin'? <3

Speaking of cheese...Jelly Belly was back again, this time they were advertising their two newest Bean-boozled flavors for the 4th edition: Spoiled Milk and Dead Fish. They didn't have stand alone samples, but you could try spinning the game spinner at the booth to test your luck. I'll just wait and buy a bag of my own so my odds of getting the new flavors will be better and I run less of a risk of re-visiting older nightmare bean flavors. Along with this they also debuted their organic jelly beans in a little sample-size, and some super hero themed packages (DC characters only, of course.)

This was my favorite (non- Italian) cheese at the show! It was a delicious cloth-bound goat cheese by Quicke's Devon England! I absolutely fell in love with it! The closer you got to the rind, the more horseradish-like it tasted thanks to the cloth-bound curing process. It was creamy, but cheddar-like, and just... amazing. I'm trying to find a way to get some to NJ to share with my family, but it's pretty expensive to import it. ;_; 

Go Organics, one of my favorite hard candy companies, rolled out with a summer friendly watermelon-mix and a new natural starlight mint!

Although this combo of mango, strawberry and watermelon are perfect for summer, this flavor mix is available year-round. You can also see some of the beautiful wine-colored mints to the left, which use beet-based dye. No artificial colors here!


More delicious cheeses...I just love cheese.

Parmesan. Cheese. Crisps. Perfect for topping soups and salads, but I wanted dump the whole bowl into my mouth.

I fell in love with this branding last year. Since then, I've bought a few wedges of  "Vincent" at my local Shop Rite to cut up and serve at holidays. Not only is he one of my favorite artists, but his cheese is damn tasty! I normally serve this alongside some diced cheddar cubes, for the less adventurous cheese-eaters, but his is always the first to-go!
Glee gum is at it again! Look at all these flavors!

Glee is now offering the first ever 100% natural Blow Pop! I grabbed a few flavors to review on the blog and I'm pretty excited about it!

A GORGEOUS spice display was over on the main floor. If I had more time I would have photographed all of these in detail for HOURS! Such beautiful colors, textures, and aromas <3 (A few people were talking selfies doing yoga poses in front. If I had more skills I would have been doing it right along with them.)

Mochi ice cream was still fairly popular, I saw at least 3 vendors with these delicious, chewy, treats in some varied flavors with both Hawaiian and Japanese origin stories.

My handsome assistant helped me get some tong-style shots of these freeze-dried fruit. I might upload them to Instagram later.  What set this company apart from the other freeze dried food companies was that it offered veggies! The peas were pretty cool, and will have interesting cooking uses, but the beet-chips were where it's at! (Those were the money beets.)

There was a little press lounge on the lower level and one of the ladies who was very involved in the food industry highly recommended V Chocolate, and it did NOT disappoint. Very lovely stuff made with high end ingredients. A little too high end for general snacking, but this stuff makes very lovely, and decadent, gifts.

Although I felt like a lot of the booths on the main floor were sweet-oriented, there were still savory tables in the mix. Like these mustard-based sauces! The apricot Ginger was my favorite! It's savory and sweet, perfect for chicken fingers, french fries, and soft pretzels. I loved the pseudo retro-style mustard bottle labels. (To the right)

Fever-Tree and Fentiman's make THE BEST Ginger Beer. Period. It burns sooo goood! There is an alcoholic version and it's one of the very few "beers" I actually like. I'll be buying some from Canals (which seem to be the only store in my area that sell it) to review very soon.

Pretty sure these are props and not the real thing...but they might have to mail me one ...you know, just to be sure.

You might have seen this posted on my Instagram, but this is a savoy curry sauce fountain. A CURRY fountain! Brilliant! I have no idea what occasion would call for this, other than a food show, but I desperately want to recreate this for my next food-themed party! Imagine the dipping possibilities! Potato wedges, cheese, vegetables, sausages, meats...etc

Last aisle of the day contained one of my boyfriend's favorites. BROWNIE BRITTLE! They had new flavors like this dark chocolate sea salt, salted caramel, and a pretzel with dark chocolate variety. All of them were amazing, but the pretzel one was the most addicting for me. (My boyfriend leaned more towards the salted caramel.)

4 comments:

  1. great pics and details! I cant wait to find some of these products local to me. Thanks for your excellent coverage!

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    1. Wonderful! Day 3 will be up sometime later tonight when I get home from work. Then I'll be shooting a haul video!

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  2. So much cheese! I would just keep circling any display with Parmesan, until they told me to leave anyway... :)

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  3. HOLY CHEESE! WOW! I love the idea of serving samples of cheese in a cheese bowl. Saves so much money and not to mention that the vendor can easily scrape more cheese and reducing waste. I'm just drooling.

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