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GOURMET NEWS AUGUST 2018 www.gourmetnews.com SUPPLIER NEWS 1 2 Date Lady Continued from PAGE 1 to the United Arab Emirates so her hus- band could take a job teaching there. "I had this little two-month-old baby. He was blond, and we stuck out like sore thumbs. Emirati women would pinch his cheeks – 'Habibi!'" she said. "We did a lot of walk- ing, which people there don't do – it's hot. We would go to the market and people would gather around – 'Habibi, habibi!'" The women in- troduced her to date syrup, which was a common in- gredient for them. "Date syrup there has been used for thousands of years," Sundlie said. "They were telling me in broken Eng- lish that it would be really good for the baby." Sundlie had already been interested in taking refined sugar out of her diet, so she decided to give it a try, thinking that the thick brown syrup looked rather like mo- lasses and could perhaps be used the same way. "I was just blown away by the flavor! It's a lot more mild than molasses. It's as sweet as honey, but it has more complex- ity," she said. "You can use it more in sa- vory applications, but it's also great as a condiment." Sundlie and her family enjoyed eating the date syrup on their pancakes and waf- fles and over their yogurt so much that they brought suit- cases of the stuff home with them when they came back to the United States in 2008. After that supply was ex- hausted, Sund- lie found that she couldn't get more unless she went to obscure Middle Eastern grocery shops, and even then, she was never sure about the quality of what she was getting. She decided that if she was going to keep nourishing her taste for date syrup, she was going to have to figure out how to make it herself. That involved searching for a supplier of dates. She quickly discovered that not a lot of them were being grown in the U.S., where they were generally grown for use as ingredi- ents. "It's hard to believe now, but dates were not a really popular fruit. People didn't know what to do with them," she said. It wasn't like the Middle East, where dates are such a prized crop that there are boutique shops where there might be 100 different varieties of dates displayed in pyr- amids at different prices according to the varietals. In order to find enough dates, she went looking for date farms in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. "We had to find an organic producer, which hardly existed at that time," she said. "All kinds of crazy things happened because it is a hard prod- uct to find to bring to the United States be- cause we have such high expectations for our products here." Some of the dates used to make Date Lady's current product line – the date syrup has just one ingredient, and that's organic dates – are imported from Tunisia, but Sundlie has finally found enough dates from a grower in the Coachella Valley, near Palm Springs, California, to begin making the syrup from California produce. The product line has expanded to in- clude the sofi Award-winning Coconut Caramel Sauce as well as a Chocolate Spread sweetened only with date syrup and made in their facility in Missouri, where the family moved after returning to the U.S. Date Lady has recently purchased larger machinery to keep up with the demand for the products, which appeal both to the Epi- cureans who enjoy the luxurious complex- ity of the Date Syrup and to the health-conscious consumers who are using it to replace refined sugars. The Date Syrup can be used in addition to, or instead of, honey or maple syrup and as a substitute for refined sugar in baked goods. "Our business has really just exploded. We're building the facility up to keep up with de- mand," Sundlie said "The Coconut Caramel and Chocolate Spread have been very popular, so we're looking at adding some more products. We're keeping very busy – that's for sure." For more information, call 417.414.2282 or email info@ilovedatelady.com. GN Specialty Food Continued from PAGE 1 growth in our industry," Lockwood said. The Best Opportunity for Grocery Retailers Retail competition and stubborn food price deflation limited growth in 2017, but spe- cialty food is forecast to reach a 19.4 per- cent share of total U.S. grocery sales in 2022. "It's a really, really strong market," Lockwood said. Specialty foods retailers' best opportunity to capitalize on the strength of the market over the next few years will be to convert those who buy small amounts of specialty food items into heavier consumers of specialty foods, ac- cording to Lockwood. "They're the easiest to sell," he said. "When you're talking to someone who has experienced specialty food and they liked it, they liked it because of one of three things: that it tastes better, that it connects them to a place or that it connects them to a cause.... As you convert light buyers into heavier buyers, you bring them into the heavier spending group." Heavy buyers of specialty foods are highly engaged in the shopping process. They ask questions, read about foods and talk about what they've found, and they spend for their food according to their per- ception of value rather than strictly on price. Heavy specialty foods buyers are much more likely than all other shoppers to be on the lookout for company values, efforts to eliminate food waste and treat- ment of employees. "Knowledgeable em- ployees are just as important as local and regional products, so this is a key advan- tage to natural and specialty stores because national chains have not been able to ad- dress this issue," Lockwood said. Light specialty food buyers, on the other hand, are a lot more like non-buyers than like heavy buyers – they're actively looking for products that are superior to conven- tional foods in some ways, but they'll only buy if they don't have to compromise much on either price or convenience. They may respond to local products. "Retailers are right to put a lot of effort into providing more local and regional products, as this is important to about half of all shoppers," Lockwood said. The Influence of a New Generation The specialty foods market is feeling the in- fluence of the i-generation, iGen, the gen- eration younger than the Millennials with members who are currently 18 to 23 years old. The specialty foods industry has been driven by Millennials over the past few years, but iGen consumers will be coming up over the next five years, at the same time that Baby Boomers are dropping out of the market. iGen consumers are ex- ploratory experimenters, with 79 percent of them saying that they've bought spe- cialty foods in the past six months. The iGen consumer hasn't yet developed strong opinions about brands, but they have the strongest desire of any of the gen- erations to support smaller companies, both locally and globally. These younger generations are starting to shift their rea- sons for buying specialty foods away from preparing everyday meals at home and to- wards snacking, buying food to serve to guests and food to take to work. "I would expect this to keep moving this way," Lock- wood said. One way that Millennials and iGen con- sumers are expressing their exploratory na- tures is through the serial adoption of various structured eating plans. Last week's vegan might be next week's Paleo eater, as he or she explores different types of struc- tured eating habits, which can even include eating habits like juice cleanses, mixing and matching various parts of different eat- ing plans and even fasting, which is cur- rently on the rise. Lockwood compared this to the way that computer games are de- signed to be played: there's no one "right answer" – computer gamers are expected to try various strategies, fail and try again until they find a pathway that's successful for them. These younger consumers are taking that same kind of approach to their eating habits, he suggested. "This is a seri- ous cultural shift not to be underestimated. That's going to change everything that we do," he said. "If you're going to make a product and hang its fortunes on a single diet, you should know that people are going to come in an out of it very quickly.... This is probably the most exciting new thing that I've seen come out of this re- search." The Cheese Stands Alone As for specialty foods themselves, cheese, a category that includes non-dairy alterna- tives, is once again the single largest prod- uct category in the specialty food market, with just over $4 billion in sales in 2017 and 6.6 percent growth from 2015 to 2017. Cheese is followed in the list of top spe- cialty food sellers by frozen or refrigerated meat, poultry and seafood; chips, pretzels and snacks, which accounted for $3.8 bil- lion in sales in 2017 with an 11.8 percent growth rate from 2015 through 2017; non- ready-to-drink coffee and hot cocoa; bread and baked goods; chocolate and other con- fectionery; yogurt and kefir; frozen desserts; refrigerated entrees and frozen lunch or dinner entrees. Consumer interest in plant-based foods is propelling that category to a 3 percent share of the specialty foods market with a 10 percent growth rate, a trend that's ex- pected to continue over the next decade. Nearly a third of specialty foods consumers said that they'd made purchases of plant- based foods in the last six months. Consumers are Fickle about Retail Channels While many in the grocery industry have predicted the death of center store as online grocery sales steal that part of the grocery market, that's not the case for specialty foods, according to the Mintel research re- sults. "It's by far the biggest sector, and is also growing nicely, adding more dollars than the perimeter even though the growth rate is not as high because it's a bigger sec- tion," Lockwood said. He noted that the center store leaders are water, jerky and meat snacks, and that snacks as a category now account for 27.6 percent of the specialty foods market. Of the 13 snack categories in the survey, five grew faster than 20 percent, led by rice cakes. Conventional supermarkets and mass merchandisers still make the lion's share of specialty food sales, but those two channels are on different growth trajectories as con- sumers do less of their specialty food shop- ping in supermarkets and more in mass market stores, club stores and online. Con- sumers who responded to the survey named 13 different channels as places where they've bought specialty foods within the last month – a dramatic shift, with 22 percent of people saying they buy specialty foods at discounters. Department stores are on the list and so are home stores, liquor stores, gift stores, conven- ience stores and club stores. "Supermarkets are losing out, while club stores and online e-tailers have improved," Lockwood said. Even though the number of shoppers in conventional supermarkets is dropping, total sales in supermarkets is still growing, and the natural foods channel is also hold- ing its own with shoppers who tend to spend more than the shoppers in conven- tional grocery stores, since the natural foods inventory is built around specialty foods. Traditional grocery stores will stay rele- vant to consumers by providing an envi- ronment in which their shoppers can explore, Lockwood said. "People go there for exploration," he said. "Maybe you want to know how to cook something. I need to go to a specialty store to find someone to tell me how to prepare that.... If you want to know what new local things are avail- able, you're not going to get that at a con- venience store." GN