Every year, thousands of food brands head to New York to show off their wares and entice buyers from grocery stores to stock their products. It’s a trade show titled the Fancy Foods Show, and it’s one of the best places to catch trends before they hit grocery store shelves. New products make their debuts there, and months later, they appear on the shelves of your local Whole Foods Market. (Also, when it comes to free samples, the place is like an all-you-can-eat buffet.) Trendy turmeric? We called it. Gochujang is the new Sriracha, and souping is the new juicing? Yeah, we knew that in 2017.
Here are the flavors and products that are going to be big over the next year:
Ayurvedic foods:
Ayurveda is the Indian practice of holistic medicine in which certain foods and herbs are eaten together to balance a person’s health and to benefit digestion, immunity and more. While many Indian foods are Ayurvedic, specialty brands are now expressly branding their products with the term.
A company named Dancing Elephant is producing packaged cups of kitchari, an Indian stew that boasts healing spices, in three flavors. Atina Foods makes traditional Indian herbal jams, pickles and pastes, from “home recipes evolved from Indian Ayurvedic healing traditions.” Davidson’s Organics has introduced a line of Ayurvedic teas, each with a specific function: weight loss, sleep, digestion, decongestion and general detoxification. Vegan Rob’s makes an “Ashwagandhabar,” an energy bar that the company says reduces stress, anxiety and depression. Ashwagandha, “one of the most powerful herbs in Ayurvedic healing,” according to the Chopra Center, also appears in a Remedy Organics protein shake. And Bohana, a snack food company, makes bags of air-popped water lily seeds, “one of the most popular seeds in Ayurveda.” They’re similar to popcorn or puffed rice.