Today I was blown away by a Hong Kong confection that’s sort of like a grown up version of cotton candy with a nice crunch, nice flavor, and beautiful packaging. I think it was the most compelling item of the day… they have no agent in the U.S., and it’s definitely a top candidate… it has a compelling story (a 2000 year history, supposedly), it’s handmade, it’s usually not available outside of the area where it’s made, and it has great packaging.
I also tasted some truly amazing oolong tea, and my enthusiasm seemed to carry over to the booth organizer, who gave me 5 packages of tea that were being sold at the show for 2000 yen each (a little less than $20/100 grams). The aroma on the prepared tea sampe was very complex, almost fruity… completely unexpected. It’s a Taiwanese product, organically grown, and mostly sold in Japan.
I talked to one Japanese guy who spent some time in Portland and worked as a buyer for Costco in a previous life, and we discussed importing some Korean yuzu tea and jujube tea into the US. The quality of their yuzu and jujube teas is very good, and they have some other stuff like Aloe drinks and thin yuzu-flavored drinks I was less excited about. We’ll probably meet again before I leave. He’s very interested in expanding the market outside of Japan, as it’s apparently struggling here.
There was a mae-sil cha and red shiso cha concentrate from Korea that was pretty nice… nothing artificial about them and a nice pleasant flavor.
I looked at a lot of Korean and Thai products… the highlights for me were definitely this Hong Kong confection and that oolong tea. I even found some nice ceramics from a Taiwanese potter… It’s rare for me to find Chinese-style pottery that I have much enthusiasm for, but the tea ware he was selling was quite stunning coming out of a high-production studio.
When I got home, I noticed a message from a Japanese soy milk producer that I talked to yesterday; they produce a yogurt that tastes very normal… not very soy-like. They have some very milk-like soy milk also, which I was less enthusiastic about; I actually like soy milk to taste like soy beans, unlike most Americans, but I have until now never been a fan of soy-based yogurts. The texture is sort of typical for Japanese yogurt interpretations… very custardy, rather than the European smooth texture, but still nice. Anyway, it turns out that if I find some sort of export agent they may be able to work with me; they don’t do any direct exports and they don’t have a huge production capacity as yet.
I ate with my friend Hiromi tonight at an izakaya-type place and had some nice early-harvest grilled bamboo shoots, some soba-based gnocchi with butter and a little shiso, and some croquettes with embedded crunchy soba groats. Also we had dashi-iri tamago-yaki, which are sort of thick omelets with soup stock in them. Not so exciting were yakimiso (I love Takayama’s hoba-miso specialty… this wasn’t it), and some soba-gakki (sort of soba dumplings) with camembert inside, which were a little dry.
I think I’ll go to FoodEx in the morning and then go to the Hoteres show in the afternoon tomorrow. I’ve probably covered most of the floor at FoodEx by now, though I think I missed a few things in the center. Anyway, I have a few candidate products that I really feel impressed by that want representation in the US, so I think I have a place to start.