By Charles Stahler

We recently walked the floor at Natural Products Expo East, a trade show held in Philadelphia, PA. Here are a few products of interest.

Outstanding Cheese Balls was a delicious nondairy crunchy cheese snack. See https://outstandingfoods.com/pages/about

Unique and good tasting were pinole chips with 0% saturated fat and made with masa harina flour, brown rice protein, chia seeds, date paste, and sunflower oil. See https://www.bobsnatural.com/products/pinole-chips-traditional

A convenient snack from Mexico that didn’t need to be refrigerated before opening was Fillo’s Walking Tamales. Just open the pouch and eat. Though you may want to warm it up. Contains tomatillo, corn flour, black beans, water, olive oil, garbanzo beans, onion, salt, habanero pepper, serrano pepper, garlic powder, baking soda, brown sugar, onion powder, an dblack pepper. See www.fillows.com

Fabalish Brownie Bites’ first ingredient is chickpeas, but tasted like a yummy brownie. Thaw and it’s ready to eat. See  https://www.fabalish.com/collections/brownie-bites

Looking for dairy free and egg free animal crackers? Try Happy Snacks. See https://marketsquarefood.com/

Totally Bananas has a dairy free chocolate creamy blended covered banana frozen novelty. We saw resistant people take a try and savor the whole sample.  See  https://www.totally-bananas.net/

To carry all these delicious snacks, you can use Pure Sage totes or lunch bags. They use recycled plastic bottles made into fabric, and then turned into bags by employing Jordanian women. See puresagebags.com

Then after eating all these treats, you may want to brush your teeth with Before Toothpaste. Their toothpaste tubes are recyclable sugarcane, which the company says creates a 50% less carbon footprint than traditional plastic tubes. See https://beforecompany.com/pages/our-story

VRG’s Chelsea Chilewa will be reporting more on this show in additional blog postings.