All the chocolate lovers in your family have something to look forward to, with the release of new confections at the National Association for the Specialty Food Trade's Winter Fancy Food Show.
This is the place you'll find the interesting new items that may appear on grocery store and deli shelves in the next few months — as well as some oddities.
One trend that seems strong year after year is the evolution of chocolate from a kid's obsession to a luxurious and sophisticated treat for grown-ups. We noted three interesting — okay, wildly exciting — launches.
Intense Dark Chocolate, Ghirardelli's premium dark chocolate brand, is introducing Sea Salt Soiree. This follows the artisanal chocolate trend of sprinkling coarse and often exotic sea salts onto confections. Ghiradelli says this bar is a bit sweeter than most of its Intense Darks, delivering "savory peaks of saltiness," along with crunch from roasted almonds.
Ghiradelli bills this line as "everyday indulgence," because, while they use top-shelf ingredients, the bars sell for around $2.99.
Sustainability and fair trade are increasingly important to some of us, and Askinosie Chocolate will release its newest chocolate bar, a "smooth and earthy," 72 percent dark chocolate made with cocoa beans sourced from a woman-led farmer group in Tenende, Tanzania.
Askinosie Chocolate is a small-batch chocolate manufacturer located in Springfield, Missouri, sourcing 100 percent of its beans directly from farmers. Shawn Askinosie, founder and chocolate maker, travels to regions of Ecuador, Honduras, the Philippines and Tanzania to work directly with the farmers and source cocoa beans for his chocolate. This allows the chocolate to be traced to the source and labeled Authentic Single Origin Chocolate. It also enables the company to profit-share with the farmers.
The Tenende chocolate bar is the result of an 18-month project in which Askinosie worked with Cocoa Honors, a neighborhood outreach program designed to inspire teenagers about small business and social responsibility. Askinosie and 13 highschool juniors traveled to the village of Tenendeto meet with the woman-led cocoa farmer group. He's proud that he was able to contract with the farmers without a bean broker or middleman, increasing the potential profit for the farmers.
Your family chocoholics are probably happy that this food of the gods has been upgraded from dessert to health food.
ResVez has taken chocolate's health benefits up quite a few notches with its Resveratrol WineTime Bar, and will release a new flavor, Chocolate-Raspberry.
The WineTime Bar contains the anti-aging antioxidant resveratrol, which is found in the skin of red grapes. The bar contains more resveratrol than 50 glasses of red wine, according to the manufacturer.
The Chocolate-Raspberry flavor has eight grams of fiber and weighs in at a relatively low 190 calories per bar. It's also packed with seven extra "super fruits" — noni, pomegranate, goji, acai, mangosteen and blueberry. It's also gluten- and dairy-free, with nothing artificial. It doesn't even have cholesterol!