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The Healthy Ethnic Foods Pavilion debuted at Expo West in March this year, featuring the newest in healthy ethnic and specialty foods. And while these products may not all have been housed in that detailed section, we wanted to provide our own picks to help you celebrate increasing consumer interest in healthy, exotic tastes.

Health Bites
Keeping Green: Movement Grows From Food to Fashion
Whether you’re talking about the foods we eat, the places we shop or the cars we drive, the “Green” message continues to build in the media. Even the Oscars got into the green act as environmentally friendly cars dropped off stars on the red carpet, and Al Gore’s acceptance speech was a rallying cry against the perils of climate change. The 79th Academy Awards will be remembered as the green Oscars.

Do you know if you’re courting consumers with green hearts? Do you even know what green means? You might want to get yourself a primer on the terms and develop your own environmental efforts. Announce your efforts to the community and your customers to build a completely new layer of loyal customers and do something great for the environment.

The buzz around organics reveals much about the good health mindset, which includes “green” trends. Last August, in How America Shops PULSE, 47 percent of shoppers said they had purchased an organic product in the past year, and 24 percent said they purchased more organic products than the previous year. Whether they purchased organic milk or produce or cleaning products, almost half the population has organics on its mind and/or shopping list. During recent focus groups, researchers heard that the turning point (or tipping point) for many is when there’s a new baby in the home — especially a first child. All of a sudden, parents begin to think about the best food they can afford to provide their children.

WSL Strategic Retail suggests that “Good for you, good for the earth” certainly seems to be a company focus these days. But it’s not only how we eat, the “whole health” trend is beginning to encompass just about everything in Americans’ lives, including their homes.

WSL’s February edition of The Edge notes, “Case in point, the success of Method brand cleaning products. First mentioned in The EDGE in August, 2004, this San Francisco-based company uses wit and whimsy (‘people against dirty’) to encourage shoppers to do their part to improve the environment and their family’s health when cleaning the house. It now offers a wide range of household cleaning products. Imus Greening the Cleaning, Mrs. Meyer’s Clean Day and long-time innovator Seventh Generation are some of the other brands that now offer health-conscious shoppers the opportunity to have a healthy (i.e., non-chemically cleaned) home. Cleaning aside, you surely haven’t missed all the recent discussion about the value of environmentally efficient light bulbs. But it goes beyond that — Crate & Barrel, the home design retailer, has introduced a line of eco-friendly furniture, the Basque collection, with some items made from kiln-dried reclaimed mango wood. ABC Carpet & Home, based in NYC, now strongly promotes its offering of eco-sustainable furnishings from around the globe.”

Other retailers and manufacturers are getting into the mix with their own “in-house” efforts:

Tesco, the U.K.-based food retailer, will open its first U.S. stores later this year under the Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market banner. This convenient grocery concept will bring with it the company’s stated global commitment to environmentally friendly practices, which includes minimizing waste by recycling and reusing shipping materials, and reducing energy consumption. Last November, another U.K.-based retailer, BeingOrganic.com, opened the first online store offering certified organic health and beauty products.

Boasting 100 six-foot skylights that provide natural light, the new 75,000-square-foot Kroger store in Miami Township, Ohio, represents the chain’s most energy efficient location to date. According to The Cincinnati Inquirer, the nation’s top-ranked grocer said the skylights and other environmentally friendly aspects of the store will help save roughly 82 percent on the store’s monthly utility bills — equivalent to about $18,000 vs. the $40,000 tab generally racked up in smaller conventional stores.

Chainwide, Kroger spends $600 million annually on utility costs, 90 percent of which are for electricity. Denis George, an engineer and corporate energy manager at Kroger, said since the chain began its energy conservation campaign in the early 2000s, “We have reduced our annual electricity consumption by one billion kilowatt-hours.”

Smithfield Foods announced its commitment to join the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX), the world’s first and North America’s only voluntary, legally binding greenhouse gas emissions reduction registry and trading program. By joining CCX, Smithfield Foods has made the nation’s only legally binding emissions reduction commitment and has committed to cut its greenhouse gas emissions in the United States by a minimum of 6 percent by year 2010 in absolute terms.

“Our company, our customers and the general public already are reaping significant results from Smithfield Foods’ innovative approaches to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and lessening our dependence on fossil fuels, but certainly there is much more that we can accomplish,” said Dennis Treacy, vice president of environmental and corporate affairs at Smithfield Foods. “Our commitment to the Chicago Climate Exchange provides us with a tremendous opportunity to have a long-lasting, positive impact on the environment by further reducing our environmental footprint.”

As a result of various energy conservation projects at a number of Smithfield Foods companies across the nation, Smithfield estimates that in 2006, it saved 54.7 million cubic feet of natural gas, 5.7 million kilowatt hours of electricity, and 4.8 million gallons of diesel fuel.

Naturally Fresh, Inc., the manufacturer of Naturally Fresh Dressings, Sauces & Dips, has announced a new look. The company will introduce new labels this spring that are pressure-sensitive and feature transparent panes to better highlight the products. The new labels will emphasize the freshness and applications for the product. While the labels are a new look, customers will still find Naturally Fresh products in the traditional mason jars that have always been a trademark look for the company, and they will still live up to the high quality standards that have made Naturally Fresh famous.

Zio World Cuisine, a producer of all-natural, easy-to-prepare international meals, has signed an agreement with the mid-Atlantic region of Distribution Plus Inc. of Upper Marlboro, Md. DPI Mid Atlantic will distribute Zio’s line of six packaged rice, pasta and grain-based dishes, which are aimed at health- and convenience-conscious consumers with their just-add-water preparation. They are vegetarian as prepared, and can be made into full family meals with the addition of vegetables, meat or poultry, according to Kristi Kay Hewitt, Zio’s CEO. The dishes include Peruvian Farmer’s Lunch, Sardinian Peasant’s Supper, Tandoori Spicy Rice & Lentils, Armenian Wednesday Pilaf, Tunisian Fancy Couscous, and Cuban Chile with Cilantro & Cumin.

Frontier Soups is now making available all of its Homemade in Minutes soups in clear bags designed specifically for gourmet markets, specialty food stores and gift shops. The company’s One World Alphabet Soup and Missouri Homestead Garden Gazpacho Soup mixes now are being packaged in the company’s signature cellophane bags that display the ingredients. The new bags have a header card attached with a brass grommet that allows them to be hung on a spindle or displayed in a coordinating eight-packet tray supplied by the company. For information, call 800-300-SOUP, or visit www.FrontierSoups.com.

The Food Marketing Institute (FMI) report, Facts About Store Development 2006, illustrates retailers continue to target well-defined niches. Overall, 14.5 percent of the companies surveyed opened at least one niche-focused store in 2005. Of these, 44 percent were ethnic formats, predominantly Hispanic. Retailers are building natural and organic stores for consumers concerned about health and wellness, and gourmet outlets for high-income shoppers. Retailers are reacting quickly to new niches as reflected in the short time it now takes to build stores, a median of 29 weeks, according to the report. As recently as five years ago, the time required to construct a supermarket was 40 weeks.

Organics Unlimited has expanded operations with a new warehouse and office in Mexico. The 33,000-square-foot facility is a central logistics hub for coordinating packaging and shipping of the company’s organic bananas and other organic tropical fruit. Organics Unlimited is a San Diego-based distributor of organic tropical fruits from Mexico and South America. For more information, visit www.organicsunlimited.com.

October 2007 will be the Fourth Annual Fair Trade Month, and is expected to be the best Fair Trade Month ever. In the months leading up to October, there will be several opportunities to get involved: Connect with Fair Trade Contest and Sweepstakes — grand prize, a trip to Peru; Suite of FREE POS — Posters, rack cards, easel stands, buttons and more that portray the stories of farmers who grow FTC products and the consumers who purchase their products; Consumer Publicity and Public Relations Campaign — Fair Trade Month will kick off on Monday, October 1with a multi-city FTC beverage giveaway at high-traffic commuter hubs; Fair Trade Month Excellence Awards — Stores and cafes can connect with Fair Trade through the annual competition for excellence in promoting FTC products. For details and an entry form, please visit www.ftmonth.org starting April 2007; and Online Promotion — The Fair Trade Month consumer Web site (www.connectwithfairtrade.org) will host the contest and feature Fair Trade Month sponsors.

Elderly people with little or no blood pressure problems can drink two to four servings of coffee a day and lower their risk of death by heart disease by as much as 32 percent, according to the results of a study published in the February 2007 edition of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. And those who consumed four or more servings had an even better chance of deflecting death by heart disease, 53 percent, over those whose consumption was one cup per day. Although having little or no presence of hypertension is a factor, researchers conclude that drinking caffeinated beverages actually induces a rise in blood pressure, but in a healthful way. As we age, each time we eat, our blood pressure drops naturally. By drinking coffee after a meal, the caffeine in coffee may help balance this natural drop.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), a U.S. watchdog group, has come up with a new term for those high-calorie, high-fat entrees that you find at some chain restaurants: X-Treme Eating. What CSPI can’t stomach is that some of these individual dishes contain more than 2,000 calories (remember that 2,000 to 2,500 calories is the recommended daily intake). Some examples include: The Ruby Tuesday Colossal Burger has two hamburger patties, a three-section bun, and melted cheeses. It clocks in at 1,940 calories and contains 141 grams of fat; UNO Chicago Grill’s Pizza Skins have deep dish crust, mozzarella, potato, crispy bacon, cheddar and sour cream. This comes in at 2,050 calories, 3,140 milligrams of sodium and 48 grams of saturated fat; and The Cheesecake Factory’s Chris’s Outrageous Chocolate Cake is a ¾-pound slice that’s five inches high. Size isn’t the only impressive thing — it has 1,380 calories, 33 grams of saturated fat, five grams of trans fat and 32 teaspoons of sugar.

Eating a bowl of wholegrain cereals every day could reduce the risk of heart failure by 27 percent, researchers from Harvard have reported. In an epidemiological study of 10,469 cereal-eating physicians taking part in the Physicians’ Health Study, those who ate two to six servings of wholegrain breakfast cereals reduced their risk of heart failure by 22 percent. The research, presented at the American Heart Association’s 47th Annual Conference on Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention, adds to an already strong body of evidence linking the consumption of wholegrain products to improvements in cardiovascular health. Whole grains have received considerable attention in the last year, especially in the U.S. where the FDA permits foods containing at least 51 percent whole grains by weight and that are low in total fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol to carry a health claim linking them to a reduced risk of heart disease and certain cancers.

(Product Gallery)
Green Chocolate
KEIKO, purveyor of exclusive Japanese Shaded Green Tea products, has launched “Green Chocolate.” The latest product in its “Green Kiss” line, this all-natural candy is the first such product available in North America. A beautiful and convenient display box holds 15 (1.06 oz.) bars.
618-242-5711
www.keiko-tea.us
CLICK READER SERVICE NO. 487

Organic Tea Seed Oil
Emerald Harvest presents its USDA certified Organic Extra Virgin Tea Seed Cooking Oil, which is totally trans fat and cholesterol free. It has vitamin E, omega-6 and 9, and a very high smoking point, making it ideal for high-temperature or low-temperature cooking.
604-521-7778
www.emeraldharvest.com
CLICK READER SERVICE NO. 490

EDEN
New EDEN Organic Pasta Boxes are recycled and recyclable. Each features a unique recipe from Eden’s kitchen with a photo of the prepared dish. In addition, two new whole grain pastas have been added: EDEN Organic Kamut Ditalini, small tubes with ridges made from a Montana high-plains family farm’s organic kamut; and EDEN Organic Spelt Spaghetti made from spelt that is organically grown in Michigan.
517-456-7424
www.EdenFoods.com
CLICK READER SERVICE NO. 493

Food For Thought Inc.
the creator of gourmet organic and wild-harvested specialty foods based in Honor, Mich., has launched the first line of fruit preserves in the U.S. to be made with certified Fair Trade sugar. The new line was officially presented at the Chicago Green Festival last month.
888-935-2748
www.foodforthought.net
CLICK READER SERVICE NO. 496

Kagome
Kagome has launched two more flavors in its blended (50-percent fruit, 50-percent vegetable) line, which now totals seven with: Yellow Mango Orchard and Ruby Pomegranate Harmony. Together, the juices provide a mix of youthfulness and vitality to a daily health regimen. Each 8-oz. glass provides a full serving of vegetables and a full serving of fruits, and is packed with antioxidants.
650-349-2271
www.kagome.us
CLICK READER SERVICE NO. 488

Sunfood Goji Berries
The goji berry is a nutritional powerhouse that contains 18 amino acids including all eight of the essential amino acids. This amazing “super fruit” is also chock full of antioxidants, and contains 21 minerals including zinc, iron, copper, calcium, selenium and phosphorus, as well as vitamins A, B1, B2, B6, C, and E. Sunfood Nutrition Certified Organic Goji Berries have a beautiful orange-red color, a texture and size similar to raisins, and are bursting with flavor that is a cross between cranberries and cherries.
888-729-3663
www.sunfood.com
CLICK READER SERVICE NO. 491

Organically Sweetened Maine Root Sodas
Crafted by two brothers with organic evaporated cane juice, carbonated purified water, natural extracts, spices and botanicals, these sodas have been on CNBC’s “Out of the Box with Mike Hegedus” and Rachael Ray’s “Tasty Travels.” Available in Sasparilla, Ginger Brew, Root Beer and some secret new flavors ready to launch this spring.
207-939-5734
www.maineroot.com
CLICK READER SERVICE NO. 495

Brookfarm Macadamia Products
Brookfarm, an Australian producer of fine gourmet macadamia products, offers healthy products ranging from Snacmacs to Macadamia Nut Oils to Muesli. Brookfarm blends 17 different all-natural ingredients including Australia’s finest grains and brans, natural raisins and currants from Barossa Valley, the wine-growing area of South Australia. It also uses premium U.S. cranberries and Brookfarm’s own sun-ripened macadamia nuts for its award-winning Muesli.
info@brookfarm.com.au
www.brookfarm.com.au
CLICK READER SERVICE NO. 498

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