The Tastemakers (20 page)

Each buyer on the floor was out there, tasting and sampling and schmoozing so they could identify the next trend that would appeal to their customer base. People like Hernandez and Weinzweig looked for small, independent producers who could offer completely unique tastes, because the people who shopped in their stores were the most educated, affluent food consumers in the country, and they expected to consistently be wowed by what was out there. At the other end of the spectrum, wearing branded polo shirts and crisp pleated slacks, were buyers from national supermarket chains and big-box retailers like Wegmans, Costco, and Walmart. As mainstream tastes grew more complex and sophisticated over the past several decades these stores had begun offering more variety in their grocery shelves with specialty foods. Although wealthy gourmands do shop at Costco and Walmart, their average buyer at their checkout counters tends to pick up on food trends much later in the cycle. That's why sea salt caramels will first appear in a small specialty
market like BKLYN Larder years before you can buy them in a big tub at Costco. In the years that trend takes to trickle down, it will move from online and farmer's market sales to a selection of regional specialty food stores, then smaller chains until the trend is poised to enter the final stage before reaching the mass market: Whole Foods.

The Austin, Texas–based premium grocery chain is the key bridge between the niche market of independent specialty food producers and big-box grocery. Its importance in the evolutionary cycle of food trends is hard to exaggerate. Whole Foods works with small companies, helping them scale their business to supply larger markets while also providing the type of exposure that's impossible to buy. If you can get your product in Whole Foods, you're now on the ground floor of mainstream taste. If you can't crack Whole Foods, your trend is likely dead in the water. “The holy grail of this show is Whole Foods,” said Hernandez as we walked around, tasting more olive oils. “So many of these food producers specifically create a product made for Whole Foods.” Independent stores, like BKLYN Larder, won't even carry a product if it's already in Whole Foods—it has already become too mainstream for both the shop's discerning owners and their customers. Whole Foods divides its stores into eleven geographic regions (Northwest, NYC metro area, Pacific Northwest, etc.), and each of those regions purchase their products independently. This allows stores to source produce, meat, and fish locally, keeping with the company's sustainable ethos, but also it lets Whole Foods test out products one market at a time—as happened with Mamma Chia's drinks—allowing them to slowly build up a supply chain while also seeing how customers react. For the producers at the Fancy Food Show, the appearance at their booth of someone bearing a Whole Foods identity badge is a moment pregnant with promise. At the Fancy Food Show a dozen or so buyers from the different regions were walking the floor at all times, and though they were free to pick up any accounts they liked, they were under the watchful eye of the company's head global cheese and specialty product buyer, Cathy Strange, likely the most powerful tastemaker at the Fancy Food Show.

Strange met me the second morning of the show next to the entrance to the large basement exhibit hall. She is tall, broad shouldered, and was dressed in a billowy lavender shirt, worn jeans, and running shoes (she wears a different pair each day of the show). Strange has the strong hands and wide dimpled smile of a dairy farmer, which made sense, as she is basically the queen of American cheese. A native of North Carolina, Strange was selling wine for a local Durham, North Carolina, specialty market in 1991 when Whole Foods acquired it. She quickly moved through the company's ranks, first regionally and then nationally, eventually becoming the buyer in charge of cheese around the world, picked for her keen ability to recognize international food trends before they broke. Over the years she has headed up the American Cheese Society, made nearly every different type of cheese herself, and toured hundreds of dairies from Wisconsin to the Italian countryside, searching for the next cheese, chocolate, olive, or other specialty food trend that will resonate with Whole Foods customers. When Strange makes a pick, a trend begins its move into the big time, and her choices resonate so deeply in the industry that they not only shape the way other retailers buy food but also the way food is made, packaged, and sold around the world. As Anna Wintour is to clothing and Harvey Weinstein is to film, Strange is to gouda.

As Strange and I walked down the aisles of the show, heads began turning. Some people stared and turned their voices to hushed whispers while others shamelessly leaped over their tables, thrusting forth a handshake, a sample, or a business card at Strange. The attention was relentless. “When I'm at this show, it's like being J-Lo,” Strange joked as she waved and thanked people and said hello without ever breaking stride or stopping longer than a beat. It was like watching a seasoned politician work a rope line at a campaign event—she was a pro. “I'm looking for colors,” Strange said as I struggled to keep up, “how something's merchandised, what's hot, and how it would work with Whole Foods. Just flashes of it.” Walking down an aisle, Strange would glance right, then left as she moved along, like a driver scanning the stores on either side of the street without ever stopping her car. “The way I tackle this is divide and
conquer. I go row by row, see something, pull a card, write a note, or take a picture.” Strange was constantly holding up her phone, shooting short videos with a small camera, and writing down notes on paper. “I'll look at a booth for half a second and make a snap decision. When something doesn't catch my eye I'm through there like a north wind.” Like Hernandez and other independents, Strange wanted that undiscovered gem—the next trend before anyone even realized it—and she wanted it all to herself. Whole Foods signed producers up to an exclusivity contract for a period of time so that their food would only be available in their stores and not at other major grocers. “If Safeway has it, forget it,” she said.

We charged through half the show in an hour, tasting smoked blue cheese from Oregon's Rogue Creamery, a creamy bouche from Vermont Butter and Cheese Creamery, incredibly delicate sauerkraut from the Champagne region, the dapper Spaniard Figueroa's minitorta sheep's milk cheese, buttery Lucque olives from Languedoc, France, and a rosemary-infused honey from the quirky little Thistle Dew Farm in West Virginia. At one point Strange was flagged down and corralled for a second by someone she knew at Atalanta, a large importer that had set up next to the Peruvian pavilion. “Cathy! Cathy!” he said, grabbing her arm and pulling her over, “I want to show you something.” In his hand he held a tiny red pepper, shaped like a teardrop and no bigger than an almond. It was called a Sweety Drop, and the company was the exclusive importer of this new pepper, which had been recently discovered in Peru's jungles. Strange was intrigued. She snapped some photos of the Sweety Drop, took a video of the importer talking about its attributes, jotted a few notes, and finally popped one in her mouth. “I like it,” she said, after three or four bites. “It has a great taste. It's that sweet and spicy that Americans like. Visually it's very appealing.” Strange then started asking questions: Did anyone else carry it? Was there distribution already? Packaging? Marketing? As the importer answered, Strange held her chin and nodded. “Okay,” she said, “let's get some samples and packaging. Send them for fall to representatives from all eleven regions.” The Atalanta folks could barely hide their joy and began pulling out other products for Strange to try, but she was already on the move, bound to sniff out the next trend.

“At the end of the day I want the Whole Foods customer to walk away remembering the product,” Strange said when I asked her what the end goal was. “Food is sensory. It's a visual thing. You'll remember the smell when you bite down on that pepper just there, you'll remember the flavors as they linger in the mouth.” At our last stop together, she encountered a beeswax cheese from Spain that was creamy, sweet, and mellow. “Do you feel that?” Strange asked, cracking the round of cheese open like a crusty bread, handing me half, and inhaling deeply. “The texture! And the floral notes! These are the gems you look for!”

A
fter Strange and I parted ways I headed upstairs to a brightly lit room where the sofi nominees were being judged. Any retailer or journalist attending the show was free to cast their votes, and when I entered, samples of all the nominated products were spread out along three chest-height tables that spanned the length of the room. Half a dozen catering staff dressed in cheap rental tuxedos circled around the entries, serving samples that required more care, such as bowls of Hard Times chili and Elena's Mediterranean Stew (nominees in the Soup, Stew Bean, or Chili category), or just making sure the judges didn't double dip. Overseeing all of it was Louise Kramer, the Specialty Food Association's wonderful communications director, who explained how the process began months before.

The Specialty Food Association is a membership-only organization, and brands need to be approved by a committee in order to be accepted. This isn't quite like joining a secret society, but it helps maintain a certain level of quality and keeps large conglomerates from dominating the trade. Each spring the Specialty Food Association sends out a call for submissions in the various categories. Each company is allowed to submit up to eight products, and for the 2012 summer show the association received over 2,500 entries from 113 companies that sent samples to the association's New York office, which is equipped with test kitchens. The samples are then prepared for the nominating panel, a group made up of nine different judges that rotates each year and includes a mixture of tastemakers:
independent specialty retail shop owners, buyers for national supermarkets, executives from restaurant groups, and food journalists. Over eight full days the judges sit and evaluate all the entries. Each entry is judged on packaging, suggested retail price, ingredients, merchandisability, and, most importantly, taste—basically what a store's buyer would look at when assessing whether to carry a product. The judges then submit their scores and are asked to pick the top ten results in each category, lists they then debate and discuss with other judges. The data is tabulated, and the nominees are notified.

Over the first two days of the show the judging room is open to those who are eligible and interested enough to vote on products (that year close to three hundred votes were counted). The voting process itself can be a little random because you are eating as you would at the show, going from cheeses to chocolates, to salad dressings then cookies, and on to dehydrated basil crystals (which taste like pesto candy) in the span of several seconds—the taste buds simply don't know how to process it all. I walked a stretch of the judging room with Esther Psarakis, who owns the store Taste of Crete in New Jersey. When we came to the Classic category the nominees were a blue cheese chevre, aged Italian balsamic vinegar, another blue cheese, chocolate chip cookies, and ginger peach tea. “It's an odd mix,” said Psarakis as she stood over what looked like the contents of a ravaged hotel gift basket. “How do you pick between these? It's impossible to be objective.”

The randomness of this process must be chilling to a couple like Louisa Conrad and Lucas Farrell, the Vermont goat farmers with so much riding on the fate of their caramels. But with tastemakers like Cathy Strange and Ari Weinzweig whizzing past their booths at light speed, the sofi awards are the only competition that feels truly democratic. To know that their caramels are as likely to compete on the judge's palate with a rustic sourdough loaf as a Moroccan mint tisane and that all three may have been consumed in the space of ninety seconds has to be paralyzing. Yet it is inherent in the nature of the Fancy Food Show: The trends that look inevitable in hindsight are in fact the result of a chaotic, unpredictable
environment, like complex life evolving from some bubbling prehistoric pool. How can you expect success in the food business when such important moments are inherently uncontrollable?

Even so, winners do jump out from the fray. Curtis Vreeland, a writer with
Candy Industry Magazine
who had just gone through the nominees, was particularly enthusiastic about the Big Picture Farms caramels. “The sofis help me see amongst the flotsam and jetsam who we don't want to forget. I'll use this as an indicator,” Vreeland said, holding up the nomination sheet, which listed the booth number of each nominee. As for Big Picture Farms, he predicted that a win tonight would “catapult them to prime time.”

A sofi win can change a food company's fortunes, but it's a fickle reward. Some products can see a doubling or tripling in orders, entry into new markets, and distributions by national chain, whereas others see no effect at all or, worse, get so overwhelmed by demand they can't meet that it forces their business to shut down. Still, the award obviously confers enough of a halo effect that goes beyond the statue's $125 value. Specialty Food Association folks love to tell the story about the great sofi heist of 1999, which actually involved an Italian pesto maker, possibly drunk, who came up after the awards and complained that he never received his gold statue. After he got back to his hotel, officials realized he hadn't even been nominated for an award, and he was tracked down the next day and threatened with expulsion from the Specialty Food Association if he didn't relinquish the sofi, which he wisely did.