Viva Las Foodies: The 12 Best Brands We Saw At The 2023 Winter Fancy Foods Show
by Fred Hart on 01/23/2023 | 5 Minute Read
New Year, new trade show roundup!
The 2023 Winter Fancy Food Show took place last week in Las Vegas, showing off the latest and greatest in the specialty foods industry. This year we saw a lot of great new products—regenerative tea, TikTok sauces, plant-based seafood, non-alcoholic cocktails, female-founded brands, and so much more. After eating our weight in cheese—and Alka Seltzer—we can safely say that the food and beverage space is abuzz with plenty of trendy, beautiful-looking brands ready to break out or bust on grocery store shelves.
So, feast your eyes—and taste buds—on these 12 delectable stand-outs.
Tinned fish has never looked so good. Imported from Spain, Don Gastronom's iconic, simple, and colorful packaging looks like the perfect fishy adaptation of the Assouline travel coffee table books. Yes, you're supposed to eat this, but I also don't think any of us would have a hard time displaying this on a bookshelf instead. It’s totally your call.
Kola is a brand that’s as visually rich as its cultural background. Female and BIPOC founded, this brand serves up generationally-inspired, botanically-rich powdered beverage blends that support the communities where they originated. With mother nature as its muse and a touch of mysticism, one can only imagine how out-of-this-world it tastes.
Welcome to the best Paneer you’ve ever had. Founded by a BIPOC husband-and-wife duo looking to redefine vegetarian food and change the conversation around paneer cheese, they’ve paired a stripped-back, no-frills, and facts up-front colorful aesthetic with just the right amount of personality to feel accessible and fresh.
Bright, bold, and energized—Newman’s redesign by Turner Duckworth made noise late last year, and Fancy Foods has been the first major tradeshow to display the brand's new look. With a bolder and more colorful shelf impact, higher appetite appeal, and a painterly illustration style that keeps the brand grounded, we’re excited to watch Newman’s rake in the profit and then “give it all away.”
Organic nut milk concentrate in a pouch—an idea so wacky that it has an aesthetic paired to match. Each container has a nut character, encapsulated in an astronaut's suit, venturing into exciting and unknown worlds; an apt metaphor for an exciting new-generation product.
We are in the age of TikTok-built brands, where online virality makes its way to mainstream retail America in a matter of weeks. Cue Pink Sauce. Once just a homemade product, you can now find it in Walmarts all over the country. And the label, as you’d expect, is donned in Pink, with a playful typography mark that feels inspired by the Gen Z audience that blew it up in the first place.
Just don’t ask why the sauce is no longer pink.
The name sums everything up—the delicious cheese crisps, the fun, and chunky san-serif wordmark, the hand-done illustration style, and the mix of characterful and script-inspired typography. One taste, and you’ll experience the name firsthand.
The name, the last three letters in particular, hints at the brand’s women-owned-and-led background for this non-alcoholic cocktail brand. Shunning the catch-all mocktail moniker, the cans are colorful and quirky and exude the joy and energy of day drinking without the booze with their clean ingredients and natural flavors.
What do you get when you combine the ultimate luxury fruit pomegranate with skin and beauty collagen? A product that looks and feels like upscale skincare and cosmetics. Stark, bold, and photographic, this oozes sophistication and feels perfectly at home next to your Peloton.
Spirited beverages without the spirit. This non-alc brand is romancing consumers with beautiful bouquets of botanicals, fruits, and plants to feel as familiar as complex cocktails while celebrating the natural components of the beverage. Welcome to mother nature without the hangover.
Sip on the world’s first regenerative organic certified tea—the same teas that the acclaimed NOMA carried in their NYC location. The highly prized tea leaves come packaged in an understated and unassuming simple white bag, with a brandmark-forward packaging system that changes color from flavor to flavor, giving them an iconic feel with fun flavor names.
Up next is another sustainably oriented brand serving up plant-based seafood delights. The packaging is clean but has an added element of whimsy in its typeface selections and flavor illustrations, which bracket the food photography. The color palette and layout create a sense of familiarity, a good thing when introducing something so novel as seafood-free seafood.
All images courtesy of the brands above.