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10 GENERAL NEWS GOURMET NEWS JANUARY 2014 www.gourmetnews.com Trade Show Buzz First Winter Edition of NY NOW Debuts in February NY NOW™, the Market for Home + Lifestyle (formerly NYIGF®) will take place Saturday, Feb. 1 through Thursday, Feb 6 at New York City's Jacob K. Javits Convention Center and Passenger Ship Terminal Pier 94. The event will feature a newly reorganized exhibit floor and related rebranding, and it is expected to attract tens of thousands of retailers. NY NOW will feature 100,000 products in more than 400 categories across four collections. NY NOW HOME includes Home Furnishings + Textiles, Tabletop + Gourmet Housewares and Accent on Design®. LIFESTYLE showcases Baby + Child, Gift, Personal Accessories and Personal Care + Wellness. HANDMADE separates artisans by process and provenance, with Designer Maker and Global Design. Finally, NEW! highlights market newcomers on Pier 94. To complement market activities, a fiveday slate of educational seminars and special events will be offered for NY NOW participants. More than 40 seminars will cover a range of topics, including color and design trends, importing, visual merchandising, online commerce and social media, sustainability, marketing and other retail strategies. Sponsors and presenters include representatives from leading trade and consumer publications, as well as support from industry associations including The Creative Home Furnishings Network, the American Society of Interior Designers, Craft Retailers & Artists for Tomorrow, Day Spa Association and International Furnishings & Design Association. NY NOW is set to recognize product innovation with awards in several categories, including the Accent on Design® Awards and Accent on Design Bloggers' Choice Awards. Market participants will vote online for their favorite "green" products in the Eco Choice Awards. NY NOW's Best New Product Awards will recognize design excellence in four categories, including Baby + Child, Gourmet Housewares, Home Textiles and Personal Care + Wellness. Popular voting will determine overall "Best of LIFESTYLE" and "Best of HOME" Awards. And the American Society of Interior Designers' NY Metro Chapter will present their "Best of the Best NY NOW Winter 2014 Awards" to select exhibitors in NY NOW's HOME Collection. Special displays will showcase new products in on-trend categories, such as ecofriendly and American-made, as well as first-time exhibitors at Pier 94. The SustainAbility: design for a better world® display will spotlight eco-friendly and socially-responsible products and producers. Made in the USA will highlight American products that are both handcrafted and commercially-produced. And the NY NOW NEW! Preview Display will feature innovative and emerging resources from Pier 94. Over 35,000 attendees from all 50 states and more than 80 countries worldwide are expected to attend NY NOW, the Market for Home + Lifestyle this February. Information and registration is available online at www.nynow.com. GN Grass-Fed Beef them and for the animals." Grain-fed beef still has its adherents among people who are accustomed to its particular taste, says Andy McIsaac, Vice President of Marketing for Pilot Brands, a major importer and distributor of grassfed meats from Australia and New Zealand for the American market. "The flavor is definitely different. There's some debate about it. People who are used only to corn-fed beef sometimes say that grass-fed beef has a strong flavor. My answer to that is that that's the natural flavor of beef," he says. "It's the flavor that your grandfather or great-grandfather would recognize. It's the flavor of the grass coming through, the terroir. That really does apply to meat. The flavor really does reflect the environment that the animal was raised in." Reed agrees that terroir is a concept that applies as much to meat as to wine. "When you think about alcohol and cheeses, you think about celebrating terroir," he says. "The eating experience with grass-fed beef is different. Estancia beef has a little bit cleaner finish. It has a beefy flavor. It sits light in your stomach. You can eat an eightounce steak and feel good about it." Through recent American history, beef animals were raised on grass for most of their lives and then transported to feedlots for finishing with corn and grain, which add the fat marbling into the muscle tissue. And since fat carries flavor, the end product tastes more like the grain with which the animal was finished. The typical feedlot animal is finished when it's 16 to 24 months old, depending on the feeding regime, while a grass-fed animal typically takes a bit longer to grow to slaughter weight, McIsaac says. "Grass, while very nutritious, doesn't have as high energy content as corn and grain," he says. "The grass-fed animals take 24 to 30 months, because they're living a more natural life, walking around in the pasture instead of standing in the feedlot." Most grass-fed beef is leaner than corn-fed beef, but that's not necessarily the case. Pilot Brands imports a wide range of beef prod- ucts, including grass-fed Kobe-style beef from Wagyu cattle that meets and even exceeds USDA Prime standards. "That's an animal that's famous for its marbling, but even with other cattle breeds, we get a lot of beef that has good levels of marbling," he says. Even the most marbled grass-fed beef offers consumers a more healthful choice than grain-fed beef with equivalent marbling, because the fat in grass-fed beef has a higher ratio of Omega-3 to Omega-6 fatty acids, with grass-fed beef having levels much closer to the levels recommended by nutritionists, McIsaac says. "There are studies coming out now that show that people who eat grass-fed beef also have higher levels of Omega-3s, so it does carry through to the people who are eating it," he adds. "That's on top of the fact that grassfed beef is typically also free of antibiotics and added hormones." Grass-fed beefalo is another product coming onto the market that has its appeal for consumers who are concerned about the health implications of eating beef, says Mark Merrill, co-owner with his wife Linda of Ellensburg, Wash.-based Beefalo Meats. Merrill is raising animals that are a crossbreed of beef cattle and bison, producing meat that is four times leaner than regular grain-fed beef, but which has award winning flavor. Merrill's beefalo has been lab-tested for cholesterol and saturated fats and has been shown to have cholesterol levels up to seven times lower than regular grain-fed beef and markedly less saturated fat. Most of Merrill's meat is being sold in the Seattle and Portland areas and in Alaska. "We're not in the Krogers and the Albertsons and the Safeways. We're in the specialty stores, where it does very well," Merrill says. "All of the stores selling this have reported no decrease in their beef sales. I think it means that people who have cut back on their beef are coming back to beefalo. Maybe it's the people who have eaten chicken until it's coming out of their ears, and they're tired of it. I don't know." GN Continued from PAGE 1 information out there—some of it's right and some of it's wrong," he says. "People have a choice, and what they're looking for is the product that matches their choices. And generally, they're choosing grass-fed beef because there's a negative connotation about grain-fed beef. People have seen how the animals are just packed together, and they're more aware now of where their meat is coming from … They're looking to do what's best for them as well as what's best for the environment." Fortunately for consumers who want to make their own decisions about what they are putting into their bodies, there is a wider range of products available to them now than at any other time in recent history. "If you look at every other category in the supermarket—chocolate, cheese, beer—we've gone from two or three brands to a plethora of brands that offer different tastes, different experiences. It's a much more exciting opportunity for the consumer to understand a world of tastes and flavors," Reed says. "We've developed a system that says that more fat is better. That's not a celebration of culture of flavor. That's a really boring metric." Matching the consumer with a piece of meat that's going to satisfy all of those goals is where trust has to come into the relationship between market and customer, Smithlin says. "People can read all they want, but there still has to be the element of trust that the beef is what the butcher says it is," he says. "People are more knowledgeable now than ever because the price is higher than ever before, and there's so much product on the market. Many of the grass-fed beef products out there look very, very similar. The average person has to rely on trust, on the answer he gets [from the butcher]." "There are people who just want a goodtasting piece of meat," Smithlin adds. "There are other people who want to make sure that what they're eating is best for

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