The Tastemakers (18 page)

T
he crowd on the narrow balcony, high above the ballroom of the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC, was milling about nervously, like a living pantry. New York picklers in jeans and T-shirts were talking with Italian balsamic vinegarites in tuxedos. A baker of sweet potato crackers, dressed in cargo shorts and a Hawaiian T-shirt, was sipping a beer next to Carrie Morey, a blonde biscuit maker from Charleston, South Carolina, who had just changed into a form-fitting cocktail dress and put on makeup as though this were prom night. “I'm nervous,” Morey said. “Definitely I've got some butterflies going on.”

“I feel like a kid,” said Juan Figueroa, a Spanish cheese monger, dressed in finely pressed linen slacks as though he was about to board a yacht. “I'm so nervous, I'm shivering.”

In a quiet corner, thirty-year-old married couple Louisa Conrad and Lucas Farrell, goat dairy farmers from Vermont, were the impossibly cute poster children for sustainable agricultural idealism. They gazed over the balcony at the sweeping red carpet cutting through the ballroom. At its foot rose a grand stage topped by the giant golden figure of a sculpted chef with a chafing dish, flanked on both sides by rows of smaller statues, each cast in the same image. Louisa looked down at her phone, flipping through photographs
of her goats, as Lucas chatted with Sanjog Sikand, an Indian food magnate from San Francisco who wore a bright blue sari under her orange T-shirt, which was splashed with the logo for Sukhi's, the company her mother had founded.

The hundred or so people on the balcony were all nominees for the sofi™ awards, a distinction that stands for specialty outstanding food innovation, and receiving one is the highest honor the specialty food industry bestows on food products. Conrad and Farrell were here because the gooey, lush goat's milk caramels made by their new company Big Picture Farm had been selected from thousands of entries submitted from around the world to compete for a gold sofi in the confection category. They faced off against Theo Chocolate's artisan caramels, Indie Candy's mango-flavored “Jackie Lanterns,” and mints in tropical mango flavor served in something called an “Eco Twist Tube” from Sencha Naturals.

“We haven't slept in weeks,” said Conrad, who is a slender, freckly redhead with J.Crew catalog looks, as she nervously peeled the label off her beer bottle. “Just producing enough caramel for this event was a lot.” Her arm still ached from hours of hand stirring in addition to all the milking, herding, wrapping, boxing, and shipping they'd done in preparation for this weekend. “Well,” said her equally hunky husband, Farrel, “the goats bore the brunt of it.”

Just then the ballroom's doors opened, and hundreds of friends, supporters, and spectators filed in and took their seats as the band kicked up a furious set of smooth, elevator-approved bossa nova. An announcer stepped to the podium, welcomed everyone, and asked that they turn their attention to the rear of the hall and give a big round of applause to welcome the 2012 sofi nominees. Ushers with headsets began signaling everyone on the balcony that this was their moment, and as the assembled nominees descended the two curved staircases and made their way down the red carpet to vigorous applause (plus a few catcalls and wolf whistles), they looked like a graduating class heading out to conquer the world.

E
very industry in America, from carbon trading to magazine publishing, hosts its own back-slapping awards night. These boozy events, complete with Oscar-inspired statues and contrived glamour, rarely matter much to the world outside. The sofi awards, which happen during the final night of the Summer Fancy Food Show, an annual trade fair for fine food producers and buyers put on by the Specialty Food Association (formerly the National Association of the Specialty Food Trade), at first glance appear to be no different. But as gourmet food trends increasingly shape what we're finding in mainstream grocery aisles—a cupcake in every oven, a chia seed on each plate, so to speak—the sofis have become a kind of fancy foods kingmaker, a gateway to the aisles of grocery stores and, ultimately, your dinner plate. A sofi win now brings instant credibility and brand recognition to a food product and its producer and, most often, a corresponding increase in orders from retailers as well as a lift to similar products in that category.

The Specialty Food Association, which is based in New York, is a nonprofit trade group that is over sixty years old. It represents both producers of specialty packaged food and beverages (like teas and chocolates) as well as the stores that sell them. The first Fancy Food Show took place in 1955, with a small number of visitors showing off mostly imported European goods. Because specialty foods are a business dominated by small, independent producers and small, independent stores, the show provided a valuable service by gathering everyone in one place, streamlining contact between buyers and sellers while also allowing the industry to network. It was a relatively rarefied affair, as boutique producers of cheeses and chocolates sold to the select fancy markets that carried their products. These foods were called “specialty” for a reason; they were almost exclusively eaten by well-traveled and well-financed eaters who knew their French wines by region, their cheeses by scent, and their personal chefs by name. They were the gourmands, a small, often insufferable subspecies of Western civilization, prone to ascots and general snobbery. If they weren't European by lineage, they were by association. Real North Americans (with the exception of Quebec and Louisiana) didn't fret about food; instead, they drank cold beer
and liked big steaks. Anyone else was referred to, with no small dose of derision, as “foodies,” usually preceded by the word “fussy.”

Ever since the 1980s, however, this began to change, as the culture of specialty food, and that of the foodies who drove it, became more and more mainstream. Thanks to increased travel and immigration, culinary influences and flavors from beyond continental Europe began occupying an increasingly prominent place on the North American dinner plate. Sushi began as a rare, often terrifying luxury and evolved into a casual meal and style of preparation that soon blanketed global menus. Bold ingredients like wasabi, soy sauce, curry, and jalapeño soon became commonplace. Driven by California's posthippie farm movement, freshness and seasonality eventually became buzzwords that found their way onto fast food menus as big as McDonald's. Salads went from a wedge of iceberg with bacon and Thousand Island dressing to a multibillion-dollar organic mixed greens industry, turning balsamic vinegar and extra virgin olive oil into all-American condiments that were mandatory on every table. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, the foodies had shed their exclusivity along with their bowties and then conquered mass culture, as popular television chefs like Anthony Bourdain, Emeril Lagasse, and even Guy Fieri made it socially acceptable for men to sit around a campfire, talking about the proper way to brown meat for a stock.

Today your average suburban supermarket now carries a vastly greater variety of foods, flavors, and products than it did just two decades back. Just think of the selection of barbecue sauces in your local supermarket or the size of the mustard section, and you have an inkling of how much specialty food has penetrated your palate. Where once stood the single, perfect variety of Heinz ketchup, today you'll find balsamic, jalapeño, organic, salt-free, reduced sugar, and all-natural varieties from Heinz in addition to the other ketchup competitors that have sprung up in flavors ranging from curry to cranberry. These aren't just sold at specialty shops like Dean and Deluca; they're in average supermarkets like Ralph's, Wegmans, Safeway, and even big-box fixtures like Walmart and Costco, which even carries its own brand of single-malt scotch.

In the United States the specialty food market is estimated to generate over $80 billion in sales a year, according to the Specialty Food Association's own figures. And although that is still less than Proctor and Gamble's annual revenue, specialty food experienced sales growth of over 20 percent between 2010 and 2012, in an industry in which category growth rarely edges out of the low single digits. Specialty food brings in the hottest elements of the business, from local, natural, and organic products to health and diet lines, ethnic imports, and energy drinks. It's the elite of your shopping cart, the cool stuff that you really want to buy while you're stocking up on bananas and milk and eggs, but it has now profoundly affected every aspect of our food culture. When conservative, blue chip–packaged food companies like Kraft have spent untold piles of cash making their processed luncheon meats look more “natural” by engineering ways to make turkey slices appear as though they were hand carved, specialty has become every day. Where it once would have taken the better part of a decade for these niche foods to trickle down from the specialty food stores to the mainstream supermarket customer, the increased competitiveness of the grocery business coupled with the rapid spread of foodie culture has sent the big grocers deeper into the world of specialty foods, looking for the next trend to sell to their customers. They want something different, something that will drive shoppers into their stores. And so each summer these buyers come in great numbers to the Fancy Food Show, where the grocery business spends three days filling their carts with what will eventually appear on their shelves. It's where the supermarket goes to shop for food trends.

During the 2012 Fancy Food Show (which took place in DC because the show's usual home in New York was undergoing renovations) 2,250 specialty food purveyors from around the world filled a convention hall the size of several city blocks, offering samples of over 150,000 products. Turkish olive oil farmers, corporate Greek yogurt salesmen, and praline cookin' Texas housewives spread out over 700,000 square feet, vying for the attention of distributors and retailers ranging from independent stores, like Liberty Heights Fresh in Salt Lake City, to national chains like Costco. Attendees tasted
products ranging from grapefruit campari sorbet, organic pistachio butter, and oat breakfast drinks to a tonic water specifically formulated to go with premium vodka, along with countless fine cheeses, heritage hams, and every single possible variant of chocolate.

The floor of the Fancy Food Show is a veritable orgy of food trends on the market and in the making, each thrust at you by their eager backers, who insist that their product is the thing that is going to change the way we eat. Inside a thirty-foot radius you can put the following items into your body in under a minute: duck prosciutto, Haribo gummy bears, a shot of espresso, aged blue cheese, a shot of raspberry kombucha, four different Argentinean olive oils, dried Spanish figs, kale chips, cayenne shortbread, a spoonful of red pepper–flavored Greek yogurt, and a boozy whisky gelato ice pop. You've hardly noticed one exotic bite before the next pops up before your eyes, like a tasting menu served at warp speed, with barely enough time to swallow in between. It is like nothing I have ever experienced as an eater—and trust me, I have been eating my whole life.

In many ways the Fancy Food Show is a giant science fair for food trends, past and present. There were hundreds of hopeful, independent startups, premiering their wares for the first time to a vast audience, hoping to land a big account and see their idea take off into a trend. They tended to have the smallest booths, often in the crowded centers of the aisles or off in the corners of the basement, where the lighting was dim. Some had hand-drawn signs and decorations they'd made themselves, but what they lacked in polish they made up for in enthusiasm and pie-eyed hunger. They sold products that included iced rice teas and gourmet jerky, beer-flavored crackers and Himalayan salt shot glasses. Shortly after arriving I met first-time show attendees Back to the Roots, an Oakland, California, company that was selling grow-your-own-mushroom kits with more vigor than a carnival barker. Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez started the company when they were seniors at the University of Berkeley. After hearing in a lecture that it was possible to grow gourmet mushrooms out of used coffee grounds, the two began growing mushrooms in their frat house kitchen. Though Arora and Velez were destined for consulting and investment banking, after
nine months of experiments they abandoned those certain futures for fungi. “It was awesome,” said Arora with a huge smile as he held up a box of mushrooms for anyone who walked by their booth. “I mean, we walked the first bucket of mushrooms we had into Chez Panisse and Whole Foods when we were still students.” Back to the Roots had been nominated for its first-ever sofi award, in the Best Gift category, and Arora was proudly displaying the silver statue all nominees received (gold statues are awarded to winners on the final night of the show). “It adds legitimacy right away. We're not just two crazy kids selling shrooms,” he said, making sure I knew just how pumped he was for the awards ceremony.