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Kimberly J. Decker is a Bay Area food writer. With a degree in food science and a minor in English from the University of California - Davis, Decker has worked in product development for the frozen sector and written about food, nutrition, and the culinary arts.
All that and a bag of chips: You don’t have to be an Urban Dictionary editor to know that the phrase suggests something’s pretty special. And given the continued dynamism in today’s chips space, it’s apparent that snack chips—from retro potato platforms to better-for-you fruit and grain options—are something special, indeed. One could even argue they’re “all that” and a whole lot more.
A few generations ago, finding anything organic was hard work. Now, although organic food is mainstream, it's still hard work to formulate and produce to USDA's National Organic Program.
It may be hard to imagine now, with the omicron variant laying waste to travel plans and sending us back behind masks yet again, but immunity as a wellness concern had been buzzing since long before anyone knew what SARS-CoV-2 was.
As far as Carla King is concerned, the contemporary cracker aisle is a far more welcoming, perhaps even a more progressive, place than it was when she was younger.
Perhaps as long as a decade from now, snack and bakery professionals will still be reckoning with the pandemic’s effects on consumer preferences and, subsequently, their own product development. And when they do, our current focus on wellness will continue to loom large.
It's a safe bet that nobody in the sweet-goods or pastry sectors, nobody anywhere, for that matter, expected still to be contending with COVID-19 a full year and a half after lockdowns threw the baking industry, and life as we know it, into upheaval.
Lest anyone think that the pandemic pressed "pause" on campaigns for corporate sustainability, think again. If anything, COVID-19 reminded consumers, and the snack and bakery sectors, just how interconnected we are, whether we’re selecting suppliers, expanding production, or packing a protein bar into our gym bags.
Brands in the snack-mix and nut spaces could be forgiven for waxing a little Dickensian as they look back on the year that was. For while the events that characterized 2020, and that persist, to an extent, today, don't quite measure up to "the best of times" or "the worst of times," they do tell something of "A Tale of Two Snacking Scenarios."