Employee Spotlight

Judging the 2001 Fancy Food Awards

by Phil Myers, Merchandise Director

Merchandise Director Phil Myers at the Fancy Food Awards with Natural and Specialty Foods Manager Ed Howes.

From chocolate to olive oil, from amaretto cookies to truffled paté, almost two thousand of the most exquisite specialty products in the world are gathered annually for a group of discriminating retailers to taste, scrutinize, and judge. In an all-out marathon of specialty food tasting, six retailers are asked to assess the merits of each product and ultimately choose the outstanding products for ninety one categories.

Delicious. Exhilarating. And exhausting.
I know, because I was lucky enough to be chosen to be a judge for the 2001 Fancy Food Awards — the most prestigious honor in the world of specialty or gourmet foods. The Fancy Food Awards, presented by the National Association of the Specialty Food Trade (NASFT), are given each year to specialty food products in ninety-one different categories such as Outstanding New Product, Outstanding Best Seller, and Outstanding New Dessert.

Early in May, I was contacted by Ron Tanner, Vice President of the NASFT: Would I like to be a judge for the Fancy Food Awards? Would I? You bet! I soon found myself en route to New York City, where I presented myself at the NASFT offices on Wall Street. After meeting the five other judges, respected retailers from all over the U.S., we immediately began the painstaking process of judging the products, category by category.

What followed was a three-day intensive foray into the best of the best of specialty foods. Tasting and selecting products is one of the best parts of my job as Merchandise Director for the Co-op, and now I was doing it the rarefied air of the 27th floor on Wall Street. Sampling thirty or forty jams and preserves at once and carefully ranking their values is both exciting and tiring; especially when you have fifty or so kinds of cookies just ahead, and snack foods or pasta after that. Were the decisions hard? Absolutely, especially when choosing only five finalists for a category and being faced with a dozen fantastic choices. Let me say that just about all the products were great ones, and making the choices for finalists was easy once you recognized that.

I left New York having gained both a new appreciation for professional food tasters, and at least five pounds. The finalists having been chosen, all six retailers waited for the opportunity to judge the final round: at the NASFT’s 47th Annual Fancy Food & Confection Show held in New York in July. There, tens of thousands of buyers sampled over sixty thousand specialty food products on display during an unbelievable three day show. I attended the Fancy Food Show with Ed Howes, (Bulk, Natural, and Specialty Foods Merchandiser at the Coop) and judged the final round. Standing at the awards ceremony the next evening, as gold statues of "The Tastemaker" were handed out to the winners, I felt great satisfaction in having been a 2001 judge. It was a delicious experience, and an honor to represent the Hanover Co-op at the pinnacle of the specialty food world, at least for one day.

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