FEATURED PRODUCT:
NATURALLY HEALTHY:
HOT PRODUCTS:
Klondike Cheese
Urby Modern Creamer
Oregon Fruit Products
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GOURMET NEWS
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T H E
VOLUME 85, NUMBER 10 OCTOBER 2020 n $7.00
NEWS & NOTES n
Granola for the 21st Century PAGE 6
RETAILER NEWS n
Now Available: Eddie, The Professional Edible Ink Printer PAGE 12
SUPPLIER NEWS n
Meals to Order in from the Freezer Case PAGE 16
NATURALLY HEALTHY n
A Coffee Creamer for Active, Health-Conscious Consumers PAGE 20
SUPPLEMENT n
Gourmet Entertaining PAGE 21
News..............................................6 Ad Index .......................................34
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Best New Products from 2020 sofi Award Judging GOOD PLANeT BY LORRIE BAUMANN
This year, the Specialty Food Association has recognized products in 49 categories ranging from alcoholic beverages to yogurts with sofi Awards. This year’s categories reflected the evolution of the food industry to emphasize functional and nutritional benefits and plant-based proteins as well as foods more traditionally considered “gourmet.” For instance, this year’s categories made space for beans, grains and rice as a single category, for plant-based milks as their own category distinct from dairy products and for plantbased protein products like tofu and textured vegetable protein products made from pea protein,
grain, mushrooms and legumes. Even wellness bars and energy gels had a category in which to compete this year. Outstanding new products included Long Root Wit Beer from Patagonia Provisions, which won a Good Food Award in 2019 for its Long Root Ale, brewed by Hopworks Urban Brewery. Like the Long Root Ale, the Long Root Wit Beer is made from Kernza, a perennial cousin of annual wheat that was developed at The Land Institute. Today, there are 107 farmers producing the grain on over 2,000 acres globally, and the grain is being used to produce a variety of products for consumers. This beer is a spin on Belgian-style Witbier and was
brewed with coriander and orange peel for a citrus finish. Bacon Wrapped Wagyu Beef & Gorgonzola Skewers from The Fillo Factory won the award for the best new product in the appetizers and snacks category, and Gem City’s Blueberry Lemon Loaf was named the best new product in the bakery desserts category. The Blueberry Lemon Loaf is a frozen specialty tea cake that’s gluten free and nut free. The loaves are individually packaged and can be served-is or warmed with butter. Date Lady Barbecue Sauce was judged the best new product in a category that, this year, included
Americans might be more likely to identify Java and Sumatra as coffee producers than they are to identify them as two of the islands in the Indonesian archipelago, but the long-time popularity of coffees from Sumatra, Java and Bali has propelled Indonesia into the ranks of the world’s top coffee-producing nations. “That’s how people in Europe know about Java coffee, Sumatra coffee, Bali coffee – those are all Indonesian islands,” said Michael Riady, the Founder of Tentera Coffee,
which specializes in importing and roasting Indonesian coffees in small batches for the American market. “We only specialize in what we know best,” he said. “My family has been in Indonesia for five generations. We know Indonesian coffee very, very well, much better than a lot of people, and we go direct from the farm in Indonesia to the cup in America.” Riady founded the coffee company in Los Angeles, California, after pursuing a career in real estate development in Indonesia. After 15 years in real estate, the in-
BY LORRIE BAUMANN
dustry lost its allure for him, and he decided to turn back to what his family, which grows coffee on Indonesian farms, knows best. “I’ve been traveling back and forth between Indonesia and America for the last 25 years. I love both places,” he said. “I love coffee myself. I decided to go back to my passion and import it straight to Americans. People know Sumatra; people know Java – they just don’t know that’s from Indonesia. Bali – that’s Indonesia.”
GOOD PLANeT, which makes plant-based cheese for the foodservice and retail markets, has been on a strong growth trajectory since its 2018 founding by David Israel and is now poised to continue that upward trajectory with the hiring of Bart Adlam as a co-Chief Executive Officer, along with Adlam, and its recent completion of a $12 million funding round. With the addition of Adlam to his executive team, Israel is aiming at a bullseye currently marked with the names of Daiya, Field Roast and Follow Your Heart, category leaders in plant-based cheese, based on their retail sales. Adlam will be focusing on operations while Israel continues to lead the company’s innovation, partnerships, branding and sales efforts. GOOD PLANeT launched into a rocket-fueled market for plantbased cheese, starting with foodservice sales in late 2018 and entering the retail channel early in 2019. While total U.S. retail food sales grew by 2 percent in 2019, retail sales of plant based foods grew by 11 percent to more than $4.98 billion, according to
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A Convenient Cup of Premium Java BY LORRIE BAUMANN
Gears for Growth in Plant-Based
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Murray’s Cheese Re-Imagines Cheese Retail BY LORRIE BAUMANN
Murray’s Cheese has re-imagined the way that consumers in Long Island City, New York, can experience cheese by opening Murray’s Cheese Bar on the ground floor of a residential high-rise building near the Murray’s Cheese caves and its headquarters. Murray’s Cheese Bar is a combination of a restaurant and cheese shop that offers an allday menu plus dinner along with an adjacent shop that offers more than 400 specialty items
that include cheeses from the caves that are unique to Murray’s. For the duration of the pandemic-related restrictions, the restaurant will offer take-out, de-
livery and outdoor seating only, and social distancing is observed in the new shop as well. The planning for the new Murray’s Cheese Bar started three years ago, said Elizabeth Chubbuck, Murray’s Cheese Chief Strategy Officer. “The reality is that we put all the vision that the planning together long before the pandemic was brewing,” she said. “We were slated to open in March or April. That paused everything.” Rockwell Group, the architect that designed
the innovative space, came into the project early, according to Chubbuck. “We knew that we wanted to redefine cheese retail, taking inspiration from some of the more modern cheese shops in France, but making it our own,” she said. Murray’s also wanted a shop and a restaurant that would complement the original Murray’s Cheese Shop on Bleecker Street in Manhattan and the store in Grand Central Market but in a location that was close to Murray’s headquarters and cheese caves in Long Continued on PAGE 14