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Donned with comfortable walking shoes, we braved the Anaheim Convention Center to experience Expo West, the massive trade show for the natural consumer product goods world. An estimated 70,000 individuals attended this year, including celebrities like America’s sweetheart Jennifer Garner of Once Upon A Farm, and we even spotted Chrissy Teigen and John Legend sipping Sanzo’s Lychee and Calamansi. Clocking more than 15,000 steps daily, we spotted many organic and sustainable products among the thousands of booths. Here’s everything we saw and loved at this year’s Expo West.
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The Return To Real
Healthy and sustainable online grocer Thrive Market’s Director of Food, James Ren, reports that food products with short ingredient lists will continue to dominate virtual and in-real-life shelves this season. At Expo, hundreds of brands rely on real, minimal ingredient products. A few we loved:
- Alexandre’s Family Farm, the first certified regenerative A2/A2 Organic Dairy brand, unveiled its A2/A2 Organic Sour Cream, a super simple take on a fridge staple. Editor’s note: This was the most “digestible” sour cream I’ve ever tasted, and its tangy taste is excellent for potatoes (my favorite food).
- CocoBear, an adorable organic brand, shared its signature SKU, an organic, easy-to-open coconut product from Thailand that’s a drink, snack, and an ingredient in a plastic-free package. No sharp objects are needed to drink from the coconut shell with its pre-packaged bamboo straw, and it's the world’s first flash-frozen organic coconut that you can sip (coconut water) and snack (coconut meat) straight from the shell.
- Heraclea, an olive oil brand, launched a new Aegean Flavors Collection, a curation of infused extra virgin olive oils from Turkey in chili, garlic, rosemary & lemon.
Single-Serve Snacks
During the back half of the day, our energy levels started to dip, and we reached for the single-serve snacks and sweets littering the showroom floor. Last year, we noticed the uptick in convenient options, and this year, we continued to see that trend grow with single-serve, multi-packs, and “mini” versions to manage portion control instead of just multi-serve packaging. We found a few favorites, including:
- Seven Sundays, a breakfast cereal company, launched “Cereal Snackies” at Expo in Simply Honey and Real Cocoa. The back of the pack was cute, with copy sharing that you can “think outside the box and grab a pack of Cereal Snackies—for now or later and everywhere in between.”
- Whisps, the protein-packed cheese brand, unveiled its Protein Snackers, a portable, on-the-go package with 11g protein in two varieties, including their signature Whisps Asiago & Pepper Jack Bites paired with Milano Salami and Cranberries.
- Kokada Dunks, a nostalgic, 90s-inspired snack by Kokada, a Black- and woman-owned coconut spread brand, was a fresh take on a lunchbox favorite. It was the perfect size for school lunches and on-the-go travel snacking. Like the Dunkaroos of yesteryear, these Kokada Dunks were a new-age take on this on-the-go snack with its signature coconut spread and salty, crunchy pretzels. They will land on shelves this spring in Original and Brownie flavors.
Collabs Are Still King
Unsurprisingly, collaborations are still king in the CPG world, where co-creations from similar and non-competing categories unveil new products on the show floor. A few of our favorites included:
- Grillo’s, a pickles company using a 100-year-old recipe, cooked up a collaboration with chip company Boulder Canyon for a “Classic Dill Pickle” Kettle Style Potato Chip. The limited-edition chips were salty and were a welcome respite to the sweets and chocolates I had noshed on during the morning. Editor’s note: Their booth was fun — they had a “pickle” you could ride, mirroring your childhood experiences at a grocer riding the mechanical horse (see above!).
- Three Little Pigs and Prime Roots teamed up to blend traditional French flavors with plant-based goodness in foie gras and pâté. The collaborative effort launched three new SKUs: a koji-foie gras, a Harvest Apple Koji-pâté, and a Black Truffle Koji-pâté.
- Muddy Bites, a startup CPG brand using the best parts of a sundae-cone, created a mini-cone inspired by the iconic, beloved Girl ScoutsTM Cookie in their Girl ScoutsTM Thin Mints Flavor. This bite-size snack was the perfect ratio of Mint Chocolate and Dark Chocolate and is a sweet little snack.
With tired feet and full stomachs, we left Anaheim with more than ten pounds (we weighed it!) of samples and snacks, including a few cans of our new favorite pre and probiotic bubbly beverage, a new Raspberry Lychee flavor from wildwonder and a box of Gal Gadot’s Goodles in their new Bling Bling Bac’n. Our team left the convention center impressed, visiting only a snapshot of the 3,000 exhibitors and only making a dent in the 500,000+ square feet of the show floor — until next year!
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