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FOODIES FOCUS KITCHENWARE NEWS & HOUSEWARES REVIEW n SEPTEMBER 2018 n www.kitchenwarenews.com 18 Snack Food Manufacturers Broaden the Category with New Launches Three 2018 sofi Awards for Date Lady Continued on PAGE 20 Continued on PAGE 20 Cont'd on PAGE 23 Asian-Inspired "Recipes in a Bottle" from the American South BY LORRIE BAUMANN Colleen Sundlie was in the United Arab Emirates with her husband and infant son, Henry, and she was experimenting with ideas for taking refined sugar out of her diet when she stumbled, almost literally, over date syrup. Today, Pure Date Syrup and California Date Syrup have won two of the three sofi Awards won this year by Date Lady, the company she founded after her return to the United States, with a silver award for Pure Date Syrup in the categor y for dessert sauces, dessert toppings or syrup and a gold award for California Date Syrup in the condiment category. The third sofi-winning product was Date Lady's Coconut Caramel Sauce, which won a bronze award in the category for vegan products. All of the Date Lady products are USDA organic, non-GMO, gluten f ree and kosher and made without any fillers, preser vatives or artificial ingredients. Sundlie discovered date syrup in a market in the town where she lived with her husband and two-month-old son after they moved to the United Arab Emirates so her husband 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 walking, which people there don't do – it's hot. We would go to the market and people would gather around – 'Habibi, habibi!'" The women introduced her to date syrup, which was a common ingredient for them. "Date syrup there has been used for thousands of years," Sundlie said. "They were telling me in broken English 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 molasses 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 complexity," she said. "You can use it more in savory applications, but it's also great as a condiment." Sundlie and her family enjoyed eating the date syrup on their pancakes and waffles and over their yogurt so much that they brought suitcases of the stuff home with them when they came back to the United States in 2008. After that supply BY LORRIE BAUMANN Snack food manufacturers used the show floor at this year's Sweets and Snacks Expo to showcase how they are using Americans' interest in on-the-go foods as a mandate to explore their own Manifest Destiny. They're carving out new territory for the categor y with snacks for breakfast, snacks that can go into – and come out of – the gym bag or lunch bag without embarrassment and snacks that allow extreme indulgence in controlled portions. Cases in point: Hickory Harvest, which makes a line of trail mixes and yogurt-covered snack mixes, launched two breakfast-option trail mixes; Vannr y's Snack Bars are vegan, gluten f ree and bound by balsamic vinegar rather than sugar; mushroom grower Porta Bela launched Shrooms, Shrooms Bars and Shrooms Jerky, all made out of mushrooms; and J&M Foods is bringing out three varieties of individually wrapped Janis & Melanie cookies, packaged eight to a box that will retail for $3.99. Backpackers have been nibbling trail mix with their morning tea since Dick Kelty invented the aluminum-f ramed rucksack in 1952, and probably for most of that time, they've contented themselves with chomping down the exact same trail mix they planned to eat for the rest of the hike. Well, trail mix has long since escaped f rom the wilderness and into the mainstream, and somewhere along the line, a lot of us stopped thinking of it as breakfast food. Hickory Harvest is looking to change that, with its Blueberry Breakfast Blend, one of a new line offered in multi-packs of eight single-serve packages. Each of the six multi-pack snack varieties is designed to appeal to the active consumer who wants a healthy snack that can be tossed BY LORRIE BAUMANN Chinese Southern Belle, based in Smyrna, Georgia, produces Asian-inspired cooking sauces with just a hint of a Southern accent. The three all-natural sauces: My Sweet Hottie, You Saucy Thing and Wild Wild East, work well as condiments as well as cooking bases. "We call them recipes- in-a-bottle because they're authentic family recipes with f resh ingredients and taste so much better than other pre-made sauces out there," said Natalie Keng, Owner and Founder of Chinese Southern Belle. The sauces are based on what they eat and cook at home, Keng said. Her mother and father immigrated to the United States on graduate school scholarships and stayed to pursue professional careers in education and science, respectively – her mother as a public school teacher and her father as a research scientist at Georgia Tech University. In those days, it wasn't easy for Natalie's mother Margaret to obtain Chinese food ingredients. "It was before Asian and international supermarkets in Georgia," Keng says. "We made do with whatever we had in the f ridge and local Winn-Dixie grocery. My mom was real creative with her home cooking, using whatever was f resh and seasonal." In addition to their teaching, the couple opened a Chinese restaurant so that they could provide jobs to other family members who wanted to come to the United States. Eventually, Margaret was asked to teach Chinese cooking classes for adult education, the first in the area. Natalie grew up working in the family restaurant, then went off to Vassar College and then graduate school at Harvard University, where she earned a master's degree in social policy at the Kennedy School of Government. After a multi-sector career that included ser ving in into a backpack, computer bag, lunch box or gym bag. They're offered in Blueberry Breakfast Blend, Cranberry Fitness Mix, Dark Chocolate Almonds, Peanut Butter Mountain Mix, Power Up Java Blend and Very Cherry Vibe. Cheesewich is now offering a breakfast option with its ready-to-eat Bacon N Eggs. The 3.6-ounce package includes two slices of turkey bacon and two hard-boiled eggs for a gluten-f ree breakfast that offers 16 grams of protein and retails for $2.39. Bauducco, known best for panettone and wafer cookies also has a new better-for-you line of Breakfast Cookies made with whole grains and double the fiber and 15 percent less fat than the market leader. The Breakfast Cookies are offered in two flavors: Milk & Cereals and Chocolate & Oats, and are packaged in boxes of eight individually wrapped packages. Nutrition information is printed on the front of the box, which retails for $2.99. Vannr y's Snack Bars, handmade in small batches in the U.S., are targeted to the nutrition-conscious consumer who wants to see a short ingredient list on the label. Offered in nine varieties, they're vegan and gluten- f ree, and only the varieties that contain chocolate include added sugar other than the reduced balsamic vinegar that's used to bind the ingredients together into a bar. The chocolate for the varieties that contain it is made in-house and sweetened with coconut sugar to ensure that no animal products have sneaked in through the sugar refining process, says Founder Linda Kim. Varieties include Almond + Seeds, Jalapeno Almonds + Seeds, Chocolate + Almonds + Seeds, Chickpeas + Seeds, Jalapeno Chickpea + Seeds, Chocolate + Chickpeas + Seeds, Coconut + Seeds, Jalapeno Coconut + Seeds and Chocolate + Coconut + Seeds. Each individually wrapped bar is a serving that offers 160 to 250 calories, depending on variety, with weights ranging f rom 1.25 to 1.36 ounces. They retail for $3.49. Shrooms is a new brand of flavored mushroom chips, jerky, clusters and snack bars offered by Porta Bela, which has been growing mushrooms for 80 years. In its initial launch, the chips come in Original, Mediterranean Sea Salt, Smokey Barbecue, Fire Roasted Jalapeno, Vermont W hite Cheddar and Pizza Slice. The

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