A Taste of the Fancy Food Show

By Sandy Hu

With 206,000 square feet of exhibition space spanning the North and South Halls of San Francisco’s Moscone Center and 1,300 exhibitors, you need a plan to walk the Winter Fancy Food Show. If you don’t focus, it’s easy to overindulge, sampling sauces, pickles, cheeses, salumi, oils, vinegars, cookies, crackers, chocolates, frozen desserts, juices, teas, alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages, chutneys, pickles, honeys…. Your stomach will not thank you for it.

Anything you would find in a specialty food store is here, multiplied many times over, available for tasting. So yesterday, walking the show, I looked for specialty foods I thought would help you make meals easier or more delicious. And I only sampled those things that qualified in my quest (except for the Hudson Valley Foie Gras and a few other indulgent foods too irresistible to pass up).

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At the Winter Fancy Food Show in San Francisco

By Sandy Hu

Many shows ago, I gave up on trying to make trend sense out of what I saw and tasted at the Winter Fancy Food Show. A trade show for gourmet retailers, the show covers 196.000 square feet at Moscone Center in San Francisco, embracing 1,300 exhibiting companies and attracting more than 17,000 attendees.

There’s simply too much real estate and too many disparate offerings to conveniently pigeonhole. So instead of trying, I just walk the show, see what I see, taste what I taste, and refuse to be overly ambitious in what I take away from the experience. Yesterday, I enjoyed the company of @JustinMcNeil of Delin8ted as I walked the show. He’s a new friend I met on Twitter, tweeting about #NASFT and #FancyFoodShow over the weekend.

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