Specialty Food Magazine

MAY-JUN 2013

Specialty Food Magazine is the leading publication for retailers, manufacturers and foodservice professionals in the specialty food trade. It provides news, trends and business-building insights that help readers keep their businesses competitive.

Issue link: https://specialtyfoodmagazine.epubxp.com/i/123797

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 76 of 103

Barbara's Hand-Made Cookie Pie in Peanut Butter Cup combining her cookie dough with pie. "He's a very creative guy." In a short time Schechter developed a cookie-within-a-cookie, taking the same all-natural butter-cookie recipe from her grandmother to create a pie shell and then filling it with toppings like apple and caramel or Key lime and macadamia. "It looks very much like a pie but is meant to be eaten like a cookie," she says. Schechter debuted Barbara's Hand-Made Cookie Pies at the 2012 Summer Fancy Food Show in Washington, D.C., and her life changed, she says. "People understood it right away." Gift-catalog companies snapped it up. Retailers appreciated that her cookie pies had a shelf life of six to eight weeks, much longer than conventional pies. Sales are rocketing, up five times what they were last year. "I'm 60 now," Schechter says. "I think this could be my breakout year." Chips with More Cookies and chips were the winning combination for Joanne Adirim, founder of HannahMax Baking Cookie Chips. Rather than studying trends, she looked at what her teenage daughter, Hannah, was eating. "Chips were her thing—potato chips and Doritos. I consider her the chip queen," she says. Adirim began playing around with recipes at home, deter- looked at the trends around her and saw hybrid cars and hybrid beverages. "I thought maybe now was the time for a hybrid dessert," she says. Barbara Schechter HannahMax Cookie Chips in Original, chocolate chip, cinnamon sugar and Sea Salted Peanut Butter mined to come up with a cookie that would have the crunch that appealed to her daughter. Eventually, she found a formula for a thin and crunchy cookie that eats like a chip, "something small you can pop in your mouth," she says. The ultimate judge, Hannah, loved them. HannahMax (Max is Adirim's son) launched four flavors last summer: original flavor (with pure brown sugar), chocolate chip, cinnamon sugar and Sea Salted Peanut Butter. The company plans to introduce a new flavor, dark chocolate chocolate chip, at this June's Summer Fancy Food Show. Adirim founded her Gardena, Calif., company in 1993 and has developed many gourmet desserts over the years for restaurants, hotels and grocery stores, but it's her Cookie Chips that have truly made her stand apart. It's not Adirim's first time out with dessert hybrids, however. A few years ago she noticed more of her customers asking for doughnuts. She recognized it as a trend and wanted to jump on the bandwagon but couldn't do it conventionally as the business didn't have the capability to fry food. So she created HannahMax Donut Muffins. Adirim used a cake batter–type doughnut recipe, added nutmeg and baked the mix with cinnamon and sugar in muffin tins. Now both large Donut Muffins and Mini Donut Muffins, in pumpkin and maple flavors, are heating up in the market. Dessert hybridization is in full effect, and the trend continues to trickle into other categories. Citing beverages intended as meal replacements (smoothies) and the first savory snack bar on the market (Gardenbar, made of vegetables, grains, seeds, nuts and spices), trend analyst Dornblaser muses, "It is interesting to see how more and more products are breaking the boundaries of what is expected of them." |SFM| Julie Besonen is food editor for Paper magazine and restaurant columnist for nycgo.com. 74 ❘ SPECIALTY FOOD MAGAZINE ❘ specialtyfood.com

Articles in this issue

Links on this page

Archives of this issue

view archives of Specialty Food Magazine - MAY-JUN 2013