The Must-Try Vegan Products from Natural Products Expo 2017
Natural Products Expo West is a huge annual tradeshow that exhibits the latest food, beauty, and household products. It features thousands of vendors that offer samples of their newest products, many of which are cruelty-free and vegan! This year’s show was held in Anaheim, California, and offered a wealth of great new products, including many that took home NEXTY awards. Here are some of our favorites.
Last year, we mentioned Miyoko’s Kitchen‘s NEXTY Award–winning vegan butter, and the company’s latest product didn’t fail to tantalize our taste buds, either. Its new Smokin’ VeganMozz will be available in stores this summer, just in time to make that outdoor grilled pizza you’ve been dreaming about.
Vegan culinary innovator Follow Your Heart’s collaboration with Spork Foods yielded a deliciously convenient bottled pancake batter called Rocket Cakes, which earned a coveted Best in Show Award from VegNews. The easy-squeezy batter is vegan and gluten-free and makes fluffy, delicious pancakes. Follow Your Heart also debuted a pourable version of the popular VeganEgg and a brand-new line of yogurts in an impressive variety of flavors.
The vegan burger masters at Beyond Meat will stop at nothing to prove that their animal-free products can fool any omnivore. This year, the company’s booth emulated the look of fast-food giant In-N-Out Burger. Although the brand didn’t debut any new products at the event, it offered Beyond Burger samples and advertised a soon-to-be-released frozen patty.
Daiya—best known for its delicious variety of nondairy products—wowed its fans with a full kitchen setup at the expo, serving several new and reformulated products. New offerings included cheeze sauce, a seasonal pumpkin cheezecake, and new American cheeze slices. Everything was just as creamy and satisfying as we expected, and we may have gone back for seconds—a few times!
Flavor master Sweet Earth Natural Foods served up its newest offering, a Mediterranean veggie burger, which not only packs a punch of 11 grams of protein but also is free of palm oil. The tasty burger, made from organic chickpeas, won the NEXTY for best new meat alternative. This filling burger has a great texture, and the blend of Mediterranean spices gives it a fresh flavor—perfect for summer cookouts.
Field Roast, a premier maker of grain meat sausages and roasts, as well as Chao Slices, shared its new boxed Mac n’ Chao Cheese, along with Miniature Corn Dogs, Fruffalo Wings, and seven other yummy vegan products that will all be available in stores soon. Pairing the convenience of a boxed meal with the classic charm of everyone’s favorite comfort food, the Mac n’ Chao left us craving more.
Tofurky isn’t new on the vegan food scene, but it continues to expand its product line in unique and delicious ways. At this year’s expo, it served up skewers featuring a meat-free beer-glazed ham roast, just in time for Easter. This savory “ham” had a perfectly salty-sweet flavor that paired well with the peppers and pineapples on the sample skewers.
So Delicious, the maker of dairy-free milks and a swiftly growing variety of creamy products, brought its new coconut milk yogurt to the expo. With a rich texture and decadent flavors, this new vegan yogurt is definitely worth trying. Luckily, it’s already available in stores!
We tried hundreds of new vegan products at this year’s expo, and while these were a few of our favorites, we also really enjoyed samples from Forager Project, Good Karma Foods, Vega, Upton’s Naturals, and many more. We can’t wait until all these products are available in stores, and we’re already looking forward to Natural Products Expo West 2018!
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