I knew I’d find superb cheese and butter, outstanding charcuterie and glorious artisan chocolate treats at the Winter Fancy Food Show, held last month in Las Vegas. The trade show serves the specialty food industry—everything from big-box stores looking for upscale offerings to the many gourmet shops that dot the country.

But I didn’t anticipate the flood of Asian-style packaged noodle goods. The curries. The proliferation of chili crisp products, as well as the strong appearance by one of my favorite styles of chile pepper, Calabrian.  

Dill pickle flavor? Everywhere. Popcorn? So much of it that sometimes I wondered if the show might consider moving to Iowa next year. Protein-packed goodies, too, showed up for strong performances at the annual show.

Between Natural Products Expo West, March 4-7 in Anaheim, California, and the Winter Fancy Food show, industry stakeholders who attend both can walk away with comprehensive assessments of what’s trending among the brands and on the aisles.

Slurp-approved noodle mania

Miracle Noodle displays a variety of noodle kits with several popular attributes including vegan, Certified Gluten Free and Non-GMO Project Verified.

Asian-inspired noodle products spangled aisles across the show floor. Interested in gluten-free noodle meals? You could find classic dishes like Tom Yum Soup in ready-to-heat bowls, with noodles made from beans and konjac, a root vegetable native to China. Another brand leveraged konjac alone for its noodles, with flavors like Japanese curry and pad Thai.

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A-Sha and Hot Ones—"the hottest celebrity interview show on the internet," according to the brand's website—to offer a line of mild, medium and "HOT!" noodle bowls.

Thai noodle kits seemed especially trendy, and so did the glorious chile pastes that serve as the spine of so much Thai cuisine. Some brands touted their spice bona fides, championing the heat levels in their packs of noodles and seasoning. Another revolved its sales pitch around the melding of ramen and cheese. 

Lazy Food's Cacio e Pepe offers 30 g of protein in each pouch, which the brand offers as two small servings. The Romano cheese sauce is made with real milk, sweet cream and brown butter powder.

Plenty of Italian brands had booths at the show, too, offering familiar packages of things like spaghetti and rigatoni. Lazy Food crafted pouches of cacio e pepe noodles, made with chickpeas and yellow peas, and a Romano cheese sauce that can be cooked in one pot.

Spicing up everything with chili crisp

Chili crisp—jars of oil heavily seasoned with dried chile flakes, often including crispy garlic or other ingredients like Sichuan peppercorns—has been around for centuries in China. Cooks in Mexico, too, have crafted similar products for just about as long. But it wasn’t until Fly By Jing launched in Chengdu, China, in 2018, after a successful Kickstarter campaign that same year, that the condiment began its meteoric rise. 

Jars of hot, crunchy iterations of chili crunch occupied booths on nearly every aisle of the Fancy Food Show. One of them, from Japan, leveraged sansho peppers for the tingly heat that, in China, comes from the more familiar Sichuan peppercorns. Sanshos are a touch less punchy, with a pleasant citrus tang. A Hawaiian brand’s product packed the most intense wallop—my mouth stung for five minutes after one nibble. 

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As a bit of a nut for Calabrian chile peppers—they’re hot, but also offer slightly sweet notes—it thrilled me to find several brands sampling Calabrian chili crisp products. 

All ears: Popcorn brands buttering up retailers

Magi Planet brings global flavors such as Kimchi and Takoyaki to ready-to-eat popcorn.

At least one popcorn brand touted its Regenerative Organic Certified status, and handed out paper cones of popcorn deliciousness. Others leaned into sweet—toffee, milk and strawberry, mango. 

One brand from Taiwan showcased flavors like corn soup, furikake (a Japanese spice powder), sweet potato and powdered plum. Other brands ran savory, with flavors like matcha, bacon and cheddar, truffle and dill.

It’s obviously not exactly a new snack: Evidence in Peru reveals people made popcorn 6,700 years ago. But the innovations keep coming on strong. As it’s a whole grain, low in calories, abundant and easy to flavor—also, not difficult to pump up with protein enhancements—I think we’ll keep seeing new popcorn brands and innovations for years.

Each package of Pacific Popcorn shares the story of that flavor's name. Elliot Bay Caramel, for example, is name for the bay that Seattle, Washington, sits on and a description of a nearby 500-acre park.