Sweets & Snacks Expo embraces everyday creativity

From an early age, I learned the great potential of working with what you have in unique ways, creating diversity from simple, everyday components. As a child (as I noted in a recent piece I wrote for sister publication Dairy Foods), I saw this creativity in the hands of my mother when she would sweeten her usual dinnertime biscuit dough to make shortcakes for dessert. With a few additional ingredient tweaks, she would also transform that short dough into a signature, ultra-tender coffee cake (an enduring recipe that itself is subject to endless variation in my kitchen). She grew up in poverty during the Great Depression, and such homespun ingenuity was part of her DNA.

During my university days at Purdue, I worked in the back of the house of a scratch Italian restaurant, and this tightly focused creativity took on new meaning, with dollar values assigned to our various ingredients. If we were to create a new dish for the menu with the various ingredients we always had on hand, it had to make culinary sense from an organoleptic point of view, but it also had to make economic sense. That reality was always true for my mom, but I didn’t connect those dots until I had one of our restaurant’s owners peering over my shoulder, scrutinizing my work, often asking whether or not I was using too much cheese (which she always called “gold”) in my experimental creation du jour.

In those heady, collegiate days, I was working to find my voice as a writer. During classroom workshop sessions, someone would inevitably ask whether their idea was “original,” and someone would chime in with the Biblical adage that “there’s nothing new under the sun.” This is the popular notion that no matter how original you think your idea is, someone has already explored it. All ideas are all already out there in circulation. The creativity comes in how each writer combines those ideas into a fresh perspective that resonates.

Such is the case with the core ingredients a food manufacturer has on hand for prototype development and formulator experimentation. From an economic perspective, working with the ingredients already on hand simplifies the pathway to market (no new ingredients to source and price out). A creative product designer can do much with a few simple ingredients combined in creative ways.

The recent Sweets & Snacks show served up a number of new products that combine familiar ingredients in creative, new ways. I was particularly impressed with some of the new granola-oriented offerings from Flowers Foods brand Dave’s Killer Bread. DKB launched its first bars a couple of years ago, packed with whole grains (like all DKB products), balancing the indulgence. Since that time, they’ve combined and spun granola concepts into a variety of interesting directions, including a few fun bar variations that land somewhere between granola bar and cookie. I’m fascinated with the notion of building a better, healthier cookie, and have extensively experimented with this concept. Who says cookies can’t be for breakfast?

But the new DKB line that really grabbed my attention is its new Snack Bites, featuring a few sweet flavors, but also some great savory takes. These savory, poppable snack clusters offer nice diversity to the on-the-go snack category. While they’re perfect for throwing into a backpack, purse, or pocket, they bring new at-home uses, too. A few days after returning home from the show, I put my sample of the DKB Bold Buffalo Snack Bites onto a charcuterie platter, and they instantly sparked interest. I could also see using the Toasted Garlic or Epic Everything varieties in salads. These are granola by any other name, but creatively spun into a new direction—with new potential uses. While I maintain an unabashed sweet tooth, the snack world needs more options that offer a savory flavor profile.

This granola creativity was part of a larger trend I saw manifested in the onslaught of new products Sweets & Snacks always has to offer, with flavor and format riffs striving to entice consumers looking for something familiar, but new. It also dovetails with a consumer desire for incrementally healthier options.

Whenever a product can align with multiple market drivers—convenience, flavor diversity, health and wellness—its chances for success incrementally increase. There may not be anything new under the sun, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t yield new products, created from familiar, on-hand ingredients that bring an original perspective to the market, that also bring the fun.