Every year, thousands of food brands head to New York to show off their wares and entice buyers from grocery stores to stock their products. It's a trade show titled the Fancy Foods Show, and it's one of the best places to catch trends before they hit grocery store shelves.
These are the flavors and products that are going to be big over the next year:
Ayurvedic foods
- Ayurveda is the Indian practice of holistic medicine in which certain foods and herbs are eaten together to balance a person's health and to benefit digestion, immunity and more. While many Indian foods are Ayurvedic, specialty brands are now expressly branding their products with the term.
- A company named Dancing Elephant is producing packaged cups of kitchari, an Indian stew that boasts healing spices, in three flavors. Atina Foods makes traditional Indian herbal jams, pickles and pastes, from "home recipes evolved from Indian Ayurvedic healing traditions.
Canned fish salads
- "Canned fish salad" is not a very sexy phrase, but hear me out. This is not your water-packed StarKist: It's a high-quality fish with vegetables, herbs and spices, and if you pair a tin of it with a crusty roll, you'll have a perfectly good meal. Sardines have been getting trendier, and the brand Season is on the bandwagon, offering a sardine salad kit in three flavors. The kits come with a spoon and crackers.
Some of the new products at the Fancy Foods Show. Photo by Maura Judkis for The Washington Post.
- Maybe you haven't yet realized that drinking vinegar is A Thing or even why drinking vinegar is A Thing. It's okay, I'm here for you. Drinking a small daily quantity of straight-up apple cider vinegar became trendy in the past three years because foodie health blogs such as Goop promoted it as a detoxifying weight-loss cure-all. The science on that is pretty murky, but plenty of brands have jumped into the market.
- Plain apple cider vinegar is, for most people, unpleasant to drink - throat burn! - so many versions of the drink sweeten it with maple syrup or juice to make it more palatable - such as BluePrint Organic, which makes a blueberry hibiscus version of the drink, or Crafted, which has turned it into a sparkling fruit soda.
Moringa goes mainstream
- Mankind's quest to discover new superfoods continues apace. Next up: moringa, an ancient plant that has long been used in Asia and Africa for its reputed health benefits. According to Healthline, it is rich in nutrients and antioxidants, and it may reduce inflammation. So it's no surprise that it's popping up in products. Kuli Kuli sells powdered moringa smoothie mix, energy shots and moringa superfood bars, with a half-cup of greens in each bar.
Water weirdness
- You're still drinking coconut water? What is this, 2015? Birch water is so last year. Don't even talk to me about aloe water. We obviously need new waters and have been drinking conventional, non-organic water our whole lives; do you even know what you've been missing?
- A company named Asarasi makes sparkling water that is harvested as a byproduct from maple sap, and because it is filtered through the tree, it has achieved USDA organic certification, something that regular water does not have (water is an inorganic compound). It tastes like sparkling water.