Small businesses such as Quinn Popcorn, Fine Vines, and Brooklyn Brine served up their latest creations in front of the most loyal food fashion followers. Here are some of the most buzzworthy trends, à la Ad Age.
1. Empire’s Black Garlic Mayonnaise
Founded by chef Sam Mason and designer Elizabeth Valleau in 2011, Empire Mayonnaise boasts exotic flavors such as Red Chili and Lime Pickle. Their three best-selling flavors, White Truffle, Black Garlic, and Bacon, try to redefine what mayonnaise should taste like.
“It’s the Dark Knight to standard garlic’s mild-mannered Bruce Wayne,” Black Garlic’s description reads.
Not only is the color of Black Garlic distinct. The store understands consumers’ special need for healthful food and uses non-genetically modified oils and local, pasture-raised eggs.
Like the little sign on its bottle indicates, the store is based in Brooklyn, and consumers can also buy through wholesale stores or its website.
2. Hot Cakes’s Smoked Chocolate Chips
Smoked bacon, smoked barbecue, and…smoked chocolate! Yes, now sweets can be smoking, too. Hot Cakes‘s founder, Autumn Martin, grew up with smoked salmon and developed her own methods of “cold smoking” over alder wood.
Based in Seattle, the company now sells its sweet products at various local markets around the country and also in some coffee shops. The chocolate chips sell for $15 on the website.
3. Pok Pok Som’s Drinking Vinegars
It’s said that vinegar keeps you from aging, and that’s why many people drink it despite the sour flavor. Not anymore–you can still drink it for healthful reasons, but you will probably love the taste more.
Pok Pok Som offers drinking vinegars of various flavors, including apple, pineapple, and honey. The store blends the vinegars into soft drinks and cocktails. Though the company doesn’t promise health benefits, it tries to convince you that vinegar can be drinkable and even tasty.
Located in Portland, Oregon, the store has been serving the drinking vinegars for nine years.
4. Blue Hill Beet Yogurt
Blue Hill’s latest offering: yogurt of roasted-beets flavor. The yogurt company known for unusual flavors such as carrot and tomato added a new vegetable member to the family.
Surely, the product gives more reason for people on a diet or healthful-food lovers to opt in. After all, what’s more healthful than a veggie yogurt made from 100 percent grass-fed-cows’ milk?
The yogurt is for sale in select Whole Foods Markets and specialty grocery stores.
5. Lady Fortunes’s Gluten-Free Fortune Cookies
People are still in love with the label “gluten-free”–at least, the giant fortune-cookie maker Lady Fortunes believes so. The company unveiled its first gluten-free cookie, with non-GMO potato starch and rice flour, during the Fancy Food Show. The company’s large-size fortune cookies, often dipped in chocolate and sprinkles to give them colorful looks, sell for $30 on the website.
The gluten-free variety is expected to be available mid-July.