Natural Products Expo West 2017

Over Spring break, I had the amazing opportunity to head to Anaheim, California for the Natural Products Expo West. This year’s expo was the biggest it has ever been with over 3,000 exhibitors and over 80,000 attendees. The expo is an amazing place for anyone interested in food and especially for aspiring food entrepreneurs.

At the expo, I was working at the Beyond Meat booth, where they were showcasing their new Beyond Burger. The booth had a constant line all three days of the show and the aroma of the burgers filled up the whole basement of the convention center, bringing flocks and flocks of people to the exciting booth. At the booth, I was flipping burgers and helping on the assembly line to add toppings and cut the burgers before serving them to the people eagerly waiting.

While I was not working at the Beyond Meat booth, I had the opportunity to walk the floor and see other innovative companies such as Honest Tea, Suja, Harmless Harvest, Barnana, Nomva, BOOMCHICKAPOP, and the list goes on and on.

Before taking this Eating Ethics course, I may have just mindlessly consumed the samples at these booths and then walked to the next one. However, because of this course, I observed each booth with a different curiosity. I would ask myself a few yes or no questions at each booth: Is this product tasty? Is it organic? Is it GMO-free? Is it produced sustainably? The resounding answer to each of these questions was YES! These answers helped me realize something about the innovative companies in the food industry today. In order to appeal to the present-day consumer, who puts so much emphasis on organics and sustainability, a company’s product has to answer yes to my above questions, in order to have any hopes of growing.

While my questions may seem like too much criteria for products to pass, the fact that so many products now fit my criteria is something extraordinary. It shows that in today’s food industry, almost every entrepreneur is a “social” entrepreneur because the business they have created has a mission of creating social change, whether that be improving the environment, human rights, or something else. The exciting part is that every entrepreneur I saw at Expo was definitely a social entrepreneur, and they 100% believed in their social mission. Each entrepreneur believed that selling their product further pursues constructive change in our society.

As an aspiring food entrepreneur that believes strongly in the value of creating a mission-driven business, there was no better way to spend my Spring break than to be enveloped in the amazing energy and passion at Expo West (where everyone wakes up at 7:00am to exercise before 9 hours of exhibiting!) It was both an amazing learning opportunity to see all of the different companies, but also a unique opportunity for me to practice selling a product like Beyond Meat to vendors, who came to the booth, assumed I was a Beyond Meat employee, then asked me a number of questions I had to answer on the spot.

Attached are some pictures and videos of my time at Expo West!