Walnuts Contribute to Specialty Food Performance Gains

Consumers are intrigued and more interested in the importance of food than ever before. This is why specialty food outperforms other foods year over year — even during a pandemic — according to David Lockwood, author of Specialty Food Association’s (SFA) State of the Specialty Food Industry Report and speaker at the SFA’s Summer Fancy Food Show.

Consumers need more than enticement. They need to be wowed. They want to know where their food comes from, who is making it and even why they’re making it. In his “Specialty Sales Performance by Categories and Segments” presentation, Lockwood shared that the convenience segment has done especially well over the last couple of years, and this is the first year ever that the top 10 specialty food categories haven’t changed.

“That’s how much the market is maturing,” he said. Plant-based meat was most affected by inflation in the past year, and even though plant-based is “everywhere,” its story isn’t complete. At the end of the day — or meal — the product has to provide consumers with a memorable experience, which most likely stems from taste or flavor. Lockwood said that plant-based is becoming non-specialty, and new proteins are the next wave of the future in 2022 and beyond.

But plant-based wasn’t the only star of the Summer Fancy Food Show, and even Lockwood wanted to steer away from the “it” trend of the moment for a bit and branch into other focal points. The trend was in the name: specialty. What makes these foods so special? For us, of course, it’s the ingredients. What can one ingredient — we’ll use walnuts as an example — do for a specialty product?

1. Provide a flavor that the consumer feels familiar with, and therefore is comforting and prime for a repeat purchase.
2. Offer functionality. As previously mentioned, consumers want to know the 5 Ws of the product more now than ever: who is making it, what are they making, when (the shelf life), where was it sourced and why are they making it. Functionality is a huge part of a majority of the answers to these questions, and what an ingredient can DO is just as important, as evidenced by the product packaging on the show floor. Product developers and marketers were displaying the function of the ingredient more than we’ve ever seen this year. From the nutritional value of the ingredient to the occasion in which it can “fix” a problem, we saw it all at the Fancy Food Show.
3. Add nutrition. Walnuts are a nut that is marketable due to their nutritional value. In fact, one ounce of walnuts offers 18 grams of total fat, 2.5 grams of monounsaturated fat and 13 grams of polyunsaturated fat including 2.5 grams of alpha-linolenic acid (ALA) — the plant-based omega-3.

Let’s take a look at some of the “wow” walnut products we saw on the Summer Fancy Food Show floor this year that used walnuts to put the “special” in specialty food.