What The Heck Is A Sofi?Sofi stands for Specialty Outstanding Food Innovation. The Sofi Award is the most coveted honor in the fancy food industry. You might say it is a Gourmet Acadamy Award! Winners get the revered Sofi award statue and national recognition.
What Is A Fancy Food?
Fancy foods, otherwise referred to as specialty foods, are foods and beverages that exemplify quality, innovation and style in their category. These specialty foods represent more than sixty billion dollars in US sales and are purchased by over 138 million consumers. Cheese and cheese alternatives is one of the largest categories. Every year there are thousands of new product introductions with the largest growth in chocolate, confectionary products, desserts, ice cream and alcoholic beverages.
When Will We Know The Winners?
The 2010 awards competition is already under way! From 1,570 products judged, 125 silver finalists, in over 30 categories have been announced. The finalists are named by a nine-member panel of specialty food experts. These silver medal finalists are then judged by about 300 top industry buyers at the summer Fancy Food Show in New York. The Fancy Food Show features over 180,000 products. The gold medal winners will be announced at a red carpet ceremony on June 28th at the Fancy Food Show put on by The National Association For The Specialty Food Trade (NASFT).
Must We Wait To Hear About These Amazing Products?
Stay tuned! We will be featuring different Silver Medal Finalists over the next few weeks. We will be taking samples of these products to some of San Diego’s top Executives and will post their comments and descriptions of the products. We will post the results of the Sofi Gold Medal winners when they are announced at the end of the month. It is going to be a very fun and yummy couple of weeks (I will be tasting everything too!)