Most of the attention at food shows goes to the fun, “around the plate” foods like chocolates and cheeses, teas and olive oils. “Center of the plate” offerings are usually few and far between. But this year, I am already noticing a handful of companies offering items that answer the daily question, “What’s for dinner?”

One company in particular caught my eye and piqued my interest with its steamable, sustainable seafood entrees like Japanese Black Sesame Wild Ahi Tuna, Veracruz Style Tilapia and Wasabi Ginger Wild Salmon. These are not your chemical-feast TV dinners of yore; instead, they are all-natural, flavorful meals with seafood as the protein of choice. These products were in trays, but more and more steamable meals are popping up in grocers’ freezers in bags that perform the same function.

Another company out of the Chicagoland area is producing restaurant-quality meals much like you can find in high-end European retailers like Picard in France. They are starting with high-quality ingredients to produce an upscale meal — also in a steam bag — that you would be proud to serve to your family and friends.

Interestingly enough, this steamable technology cropped up first in private label offerings from Europe before it was adopted by frozen vegetable producers. The frozen veggie manufacturers have been on board with steam-in-the-bag offerings for the past few years now, so it’s a natural transition that the entrée manufacturers would follow suit. Now that most households in America cannot “cook” without a microwave, we’re seeing new item introductions with microwave-only instructions. The day of the dual microwave or oven tray seems to be a thing of the past. more

The $4 billion food bar category is dominated by functional options. Look at any snack aisle or checkout display and you’ll see energy bars, breakfast bars, nutrition bars — and nowadays, even pregnancy bars.

To stand out from the crowd, some companies have gone back to the drawing board to focus a different, completely radical concept: taste.

“People say they’re looking for all sorts of things in a bar, but when it comes down to it they want to enjoy eating it,” said Frankie Whitman, vice president of marketing at Full Bloom Baking Company, a wholesale baking business based in Newark, California.

It was this thought that led Full Bloom and others to develop “artisan” bars that emphasize unique, gourmet ingredients and a handmade style of production. This fall, Full Bloom released a 12-grain toasted oatmeal bar. The company is also working on a cranberry almond bar made with ancient grains, and a bacon cornflake bar. That’s right, a bacon cornflake bar. more

From our “What Are They Thinking?” file: Kellogg’s is currently under fire for splashing a huge “Immunity” banner across its best-selling Rice Krispies brand just as parental concern over the H1N1 virus is reaching a feverish pitch.

“Now helps support your child’s immunity,” is the exact phrasing, along with a graphic touting that the cereal’s increased fortification with 25% of the daily values of antioxidants and nutrients like Vitamins A, B, C and E.

This is a cereal that still lists sugar as the second ingredient. Even more of an eyebrow-raiser is Rice Krispies’ companion Cocoa Krispies, which sports the same claim on its box. Cocoa Krispies also contains sugar, high fructose corn syrup and trans-fat, according to the ingredients panel. But ignore that. It’s fortified with vitamins to help ward off the child-killer swine flu.

For its part, Kellogg’s claims the fortification decision was made a year ago, well before the current flu scare. Knowing that recipe tinkering can be an involved process, I can’t quibble with that. However I do recall visiting Unilever’s corporate test kitchen right after the low-carb craze engulfed the country some years ago, when I got to taste low-carb versions of their best-selling salad dressings, mayonnaise and the like.

The executives I met with proudly announced that reformulating the products took the company a matter of weeks. I can’t imagine what’s so complicated about boosting vitamin percentages that it took the food scientists at Kellogg’s a year. more

Every afternoon when the dismissal bell rang, we’d grab our empty lunchboxes and homework-heavy bookbags and politely obey the crossing guard before the magnet pulled on the pennies, nickels and dimes in our pockets and drew us irresistibly to the corner of Hudson Street and Duncan Avenue.

That’s where Al’s Market was located. Inside, Al presided over a whole counterful of candy, gum and trading cards. This was his rush hour, and he was always ready, sitting on an old stool in his ubiquitous white dress shirt and black suspenders, a friendly old guy who ran the tiny storefront with his wife, who would pop out of the back and help preside over the sudden tide of youngsters that would flood the old wooden boards and homemade fixtures, without fail, five days a week at 2:30 pm.

Al’s was small, outdated and old-fashioned (and not pictured here), but he sure knew how to merchandise to his primary customer: No category management best practices or planograms here. Al seemed intuitively to know exactly where to place the candy and snacks: Right at second-grade height. Good ‘n Plenty, Snickers, Chunky and for the truly sugar-deprived, Charleston Chew, a seemingly foot-long bar of chocolate and nougat that was the length of a band practice drumstick. There were also Topps baseball cards and Wacky Packs, too. And bags of chips and grape Nehi and RC Cola in a small reach-in cooler.

Those are fond memories. It’s likely that all of us had a corner store to look forward to after a grueling day of multiplication tables and kickball, right? But things seem to have taken an ominous turn somewhere. A new report out shows that children in Philadelphia who attended public schools and shopped at corner stores before or after school purchased almost 360 calories of foods and beverages per visit. According to the study, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, “Chips, candy and sugar-sweetened beverages were the most frequently purchased items. This is the first study to document both what foods and beverages children purchased in local corner stores on their way to and from school, and the nutritional content of those items.” more

The vast majority of foods found in the supermarket contain genetically modified ingredients. That’s a fact many farmers and agribusiness interests can be proud of — but for consumers, not so much. According to recent polls, 53% say they would not buy food if they knew it was genetically modified, while 87% say they want GMO-containing items to be properly labeled.

Assuming shoppers’ food knowledge continues to evolve as it has, it would appear the industry has set itself up for a massive backlash. Right? In reality, it seems people are mostly — as the 87% figure indicates — anxious for some transparency on the issue.

And that’s where the Non GMO Project comes in. Up to this point, labeling has been a scattershot affair. Organic certification is supposed to factor out GMO use, but recent science has shown it’s not doing the job. To fill the gap, hundreds of natural and organic manufacturers have started slapping their own “GMO-Free” labels on their products. But there’s no uniform standard to verify the integrity of these claims.

The Non GMO Project, which counts many of the major players in the natural and organic industry among its members, has established the first-ever voluntary standard to signify products that contain no GM ingredients. more

A new report out from researchers at Baylor College of Medicine finds that the prevalence of lactose intolerance may be far lower than previously estimated.

Sound familiar? You bet it does. This past summer, we reported on the still-booming gluten-free category, noting that the number of Americans who actually suffer from gluten intolerance is but a fraction of the total population using GF products.

“The bulk of the people following the diet don’t have celiac disease but some form of gluten sensitivity,” is what Cynthia Kupper, executive director of the Gluten Intolerance Group, told me at the time. ”When they take gluten out of their diet, they tend to feel better.”

The lactose study, which used data from a national sample of three ethnic groups, reveals a similar pattern. The overall prevalence rate of self-reported lactose intolerance is 12%. Within that number, 7.7% of European Americans, 10.1% of Hispanic Americans and 19.5% of African Americans consider themselves lactose intolerant.

Now, here’s the kicker: The new findings, published in the most recent issue of Nutrition Today, indicate that previous estimates of lactose intolerance incidence may be overestimated by a wide margin. Previous studies have found it affects approximately 15% of European Americans, 50% of Mexican Americans and 80% of African Americans. more

Say what you will about the economy, employment and consumer spending, but I remain impressed with the way the health and wellness market continues to adapt. Last week we wrote about aspirin pods shaped liked hearts and mellow ceiling lights that induce drowsiness.

This week, we have raw water from Maine and dry cranberries harvested by an Indian tribe in Oregon. What qualifies these products as interesting are their niche-iness. No one is going to make a billion dollars out of these endeavours, but they are differentiated enough and fill a growing demand for raw foods, a topic we’ve written about before, both on this blog and in the print issue of SN Whole Health.

Raw Water is the result of a waiver granted by Maine authorities for the Summit Spring bottled water company, based in Harrison, Maine, to sell spring water that has not undergone any filtration or treatment, and has not traveled through any pumps or boreholes. It’s raw, with microscopic algae, potassium, sodium, magnesium and calcium all going into the bottle.

The idea — much like the one that propelled the artisan salt category — is that Raw Water is a “nutrient rich; ‘living’ spring water” that has not been stripped of naturally occurring elements. Each one-liter bottle is wrapped in a recycled-content brown paper bag lined with wax, to protect it from decomposition and to protect the taste. more

Don’t count high fructose corn syrup out just yet. Stevia is not going to take over the sweetener world, as many have been predicting. In fact, the Center for Consumer Freedom launched a new ad campaign this week that stresses the similarities between HFCS and sugar.

“The myth that high fructose corn syrup is somehow a greater contributor to obesity than cane sugar, beet sugar, or honey has been soundly debunked by nutritional experts, but HFCS is still widely misunderstood by the public,” said Sarah Longwell, the spokesperson for the campaign.

Print ads appeared this week, and television spots will soon follow (shown at right). In these, actors dressed as an ear of corn, a sugar cube and a honey bear standing in a police line-up play up the “wrongly accused” theme, as the “victim” in the commercial is unable to identify the sweetener responsible for making him gain weight because all three sugars are nutritionally the same.

The television commercial will air on MSNBC, Fox News, CNN and CNBC and will run for three weeks, according to CCF officials. more

It only took about two hours walking the exhibition floor at last week’s Natural Products Expo East show in Boston before we began noticing some common threads running among the exhibitors. Here are some of the more interesting ones we’re going to follow up on in our next print issue of SN Whole Health, coming out in late November:

- Licorice. I can’t tell what’s healthful about this candy item, though the products we’re seeing are a far cry from the childhood Twizzlers sticks. These are adult products, with grown-up flavors and ingredients that include (in the case of one company) a distinctly satisfying herbal variety. One exhibtor told me there are cough-supressant proerties associated with licorice.

- Green Tea Powder. This is probably the tea category’s answer to all the powdered drink mixes and powdered functional sports beverages that have hit the market in the past 18 months, something we’ve written about here, as well as the print publication. The tea powder is sort of like Japanese matcha, that strong-grassy flavored powder that’s great hot or cold. Some brands come in single-serving pouches and are flavored additionally with ingredients like lemon or ginger.

- Rice Cake Machines. Talk about an action station. Long a fixture in Asian food stores, these small-footprint devices make a distinct “Pop” sound each time they spit out a crisp, fresh rice cake. One manufacturer told us they are already in talks with retailers like Kroger and Safeway, so could these machines do for Asian enthusiasts what the in-store tortilleria has done for Mexican food lovers?

(Photo credit: Peyri Leigh)

There’s been plenty of skepticism surrounding Stevia in the past, but the all-natural, no-calorie sweetener cleared all its regulatory hurdles and has enjoyed a promising early run in the marketplace. And its potential going forward is huge.

How huge? Well, market research firm Mintel calls Stevia the “holy grail” of sweeteners in its latest report — capable of becoming a $2-billion-a-year industry by 2011 (sales currently sit at just under $100 million).

That seems like a pretty generous assessment for a Paraguayan shrub. But if you look at all the factors surrounding the market right now, things start to make more sense.

First and foremost, there’s PureVia and Truvia. These are the two new Stevia sweetener products hitting the market, and they’ve addressed what’s been missing from the original formulation: taste. The secret, apparently, is in enhancing rebaudioside A, the sweetest component of the plant. The major companies behind these products, including PepsiCo, which co-owns PureVia, and Cargill, which sells Reb A, as it’s known in the industry, have poured considerable resources into research and product expansion. So not only will PureVia and Truvia get a considerable mainstream push, but the industry will likely evolve to become even more palatable. more