Why Is Breakfast Such a Problem?

Earlier this month, I escaped the cold snap (you know, the one that comes before fake spring), to attend the Natural Products Expo West. For the uninitiated, Expo West is a trade show for folks in the consumer packaged goods industry to talk shop, debut new products, and find distributors. It’s also a great place for food media to sleuth out food trends and figure out what’s going on behind the scenes at a lot of these companies that have a hand in what makes it to your grocery store shelves in all sorts of forms — ingredients, packaging, new frozen aisle staples, white-labeled brands hiding in your favorite German budget supermarket, and more.

This is my second year going to Expo West, and it is, of course, very fun to spend two days romping around a behemoth of a convention center in sunny Anaheim where my whole job is to taste and assess a bunch of snacks and drinks. I wrote about some of my favorite new foods from this year’s Expo for Wirecutter — read it here! But after the marathon run of protein-boosted gloops and fiber-boosted glops swirling in my stomach, I did take off from LAX with a carry-on full of samples and a few questions.