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Naturally Healthy GOURMET NEWS AUGUST 2019 www.gourmetnews.com NATURALLY HEALTHY 1 3 2019 KeHE Holiday Show Breaks Record Nearly 5,000 industry professionals joined KeHE in Chicago, Illinois, for the record- breaking 2019 KeHE Holiday Show, June 12-13. With more than 750 exhibitors, Chicago's McCormick Place was buzzing with innovative new items and tried and true favorites for retailers to purchase, learn, and experience for the upcoming holiday season. Attendees explored innovative items fea- tured in the OnTrend ® Pavilion, which also highlighted items from fellow Certified B Corporations and KeHE's 2019 CARE- trade™ partners, including Bhakti, Nuttzo, The Soulfull Project, This Bar Saves Lives and World Centric. "The amount of innovation our suppliers have on display at our shows continues to raise the bar," said Brandon Barnholt, Pres- ident and Chief Executive Officer of KeHE. "Our retailers depend on our shows to taste and see OnTrend items and to stay ahead of the pack when it comes to their category sets. We're proud of the marketplace we've created at the Holiday Show that allows our attendees to experience and explore all KeHE has to offer in the specialty, natural and organic and fresh arenas." Barnholt kicked off the show with his an- nual president's address about the state of the industry, where it's going, and ways KeHE is growing and evolving to meet the ever-changing needs of its retail and sup- plier partners. On the second day of the show, KeHE launched its Serving Goodness event, in which thousands of attendees vol- unteered to help pack 50,000 meals for Chicago families in need, that featured products donated by show exhibitors – all in less than 45 minutes. "After partnering with the Children's Hunger Fund for a sim- ilar event at [Natural Products] Expo West, we knew we wanted to bring this experi- ence to our own shows and create a com- munity of goodness with our own attendees," said Ari Goldsmith, KeHE's Ex- ecutive Director of Marketing. "With nearly 5,000 attendees, many hands made light work, and we were able to make a tremen- dous impact before hitting the exhibit hall for day two. We're very thankful for the big heart of the KeHE community who helped us serve to make lives better." Ten exhibitors were chosen to win KeHE's OnTrend Awards. They included Vitacup, 4th & Heart, Justins, Mush, Base Culture, The Bear & The Rat: Cool Treats for Dogs, Good Goo, Vital Farms, Artisan Tropic, Nutiva and, finally, Nuttzo, which won the best of show award. Following the show, KeHE vendors donated nearly 40,000 pounds of food products to the Greater Chicago Food Depository. The 2020 KeHE Summer Show will be held February 4-5 in New Orleans, Louisiana. The show is open by invitation only. For more information, visit www.kehe.com. GN Crunchy Granola Goodness in a Portable Snack Humrichouser's friends encouraged her to take her Granola Cookie Crunch to the local farmers market, where, every week- end for two years straight, she sold out. Local grocery retailers saw what was hap- pening, and a few of them approached her and asked her if they could carry her prod- uct in their stores after the farmers market season had ended. Humrichouser started looking for a commercial kitchen. She found a 350 square-foot facility that had been vacated by a pizza kitchen. "It was a few minutes from our house, and it was a small kitchen that we could move into and get it licensed because it had been used for food service in the past," she said. Three years later, she moved out of the for- mer pizza shop and into a 1,000 square-foot facility. Then in January, 2017, she moved into a 7,500 square-foot bakery, where eight employees make small batch after small batch of her Granola Cookie Crunch in four year- round flavors as well as occasional seasonal flavors. "With this move, it has allowed us to be in a location that suited us for bringing on larger customers," she said. The move has also facilitated supplier audits and food safety planning and documentation to qualify for national distribution to grocers who sell the products in either the granola, healthy snack or cookie sections of their shelves. Crazy Monkey Baking is also certified as a woman-owned business, and Humric- houser offers contract manufacturing serv- ices to other companies that have a granola formula but not a facility. "Even after all this time, baking is still my greatest pas- sion," she said. "I don't get to do it that often any more, that that's what I love working with most in the business." Crazy Monkey Baking is now offered in Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip and Dark Chocolate Chip, Mint Chocolate Chip and Cranberry Almond flavors in 1.25-ounce bags that are smart-snack approved for schools. They retail for 99 cents to $1.49. Those four flavors plus White Chocolate Cranberry are also offered in 7.5-ounce bags along with a rotation of seasonal fla- vors that includes Cinnamon Pecan in the winter, Lemon Coconut in summer and Pumpkin Seed & Spice in the fall. Addi- tional special-edition flavors also appear occasionally. "We have a variety of flavors, so there's some variety to appeal to the kids and adults alike," Humrichouser said. All of the products are wheat free and made with 100 percent whole grains. Oats are nat- urally gluten free, and the products are sweet- ened with honey, molasses and evaporated cane sugar. A serving of the Dark Chocolate Chip flavor Granola Cookie Crunch contains 8 grams of added sugars and 6 grams of fat along with 3 grams of protein and 150 calo- ries. "There is fat in oats and in whole grain cornmeal and in flax seeds, but it's all healthy fat," Humrichouser said. "When you have the real ingredients without the fats stripped from them, you're going to get those good, healthy calories in the fat." For more information, visit www .crazymonkeybaking.com. GN BY LORRIE BAUMANN Crazy Monkey Baking's Granola Cookie Crunch comes from a mom who had a de- gree in dietetics and an urgent desire to give her own kids a snack that she could feel conscientious about giving them and that they'd enjoy too. She started with an oatmeal cookie that her kids enjoyed and went to work on the recipe to come up with a product that was a bit more oat and a little less cookie but still delicious. Her kids loved it. Their friends loved it. "My kids really liked it, and that's the beauty of children – that they'll be honest," said Teresa Humrichouser, that Ashland, Ohio, mom. "We are a chocolate family, so I knew that if I put chocolate in it, there was a pretty good chance they would eat it." It was a bonus that she could take it along in her mom-van, and the kids could nibble on it during their rides without leaving behind a mess of crumbs in the car. "Our lives are so busy, so, as a mom, I can have this in my minivan as I pick the kids up from practice," she said. Avocado and Cauliflower that Crunch dense, tasty — people get it." In that quest for a tasty avocado snack, Hippie Snacks' research and development team tried a lot of different approaches, from baking slices of avocado to freeze-drying, but they kept running into barriers created by the natural oiliness of avo- cados, their ten- dency to turn brown when the tissue is exposed to air, the fruit's tendency to turn bitter when it's dried, and when those ap- proaches didn't pan out, the team turned its attention to cauliflower a year or two be- fore cauliflower found itself trending in the market. "We had kind of given up on avo- cado," Walker said. "We tend to take food that has a long tail [rather than leaping on trends]. Cauliflower took off this year, but it just happened. We just thought it was a great way to create a cracker without flour." As the team was coming up with a way to do that by blending the cauliflower into a base with some starch in it to hold the crisp together, they started wondering if they could maybe lick their avocado problem with the same approach, and they made it work. The resulting Avo- cado Crisps have avocado as their first in- gredient, just as the ingredients label for the Cauliflower Crisps starts out with cau- liflower. That's important to Hippie Snacks, Walker said. "Some snack-makers, they want to latch onto a popular trend, kind of fairy-dust their products with whatever the trendy ingredient is," he said. "We're not going to call something an Avocado Crisp if avocado isn't the first ingredient. No to- kenism here." Both the Avocado Crisps and Cauliflower Crisps are plant-based, non-GMO and gluten free. "All of our products go through Non-GMO Project verification," Walker said. They're offered in 2.5-ounce bags that retail for $4.99 in the U.S. For more infor- mation, visit www.hippiesnacks.com. GN BY LORRIE BAUMANN Making snacks from real food is in the DNA at Hippie Snacks, says Founder Ian Walker, who started the business in the late 2000s with Coconut Chips. "We brought that out before any of the players in the States brought out a coconut chip," he said. "Right from the get-go, we liked the idea of making products that were as close to their natural state as possible but were a little more convenient." Hippie Snacks' latest innovations are a family of crispy cracker-type snacks: Cau- liflower Crisps in Original and Classic Ranch flavors and Avocado Crisps in Gua- camole and Sea Salt flavors. "For eight years, we've been trying to come up with an avocado snack," Walker said. "Nutrient-