The Forest and the Trees

When simultaneously putting on and covering a show like SupplySide West, it’s easy to periodically miss the forest for the trees. Each new moderated educational session or meeting with an exhibitor brings new insights, often honed into carefully carved niches—specific ingredients, combined flavor and fortification strategies for set applications, and so on. Glimpses of cactus fruit, esoteric botanicals begging for upped exposure, additives to improve ingredient efficacy, beneficial bacteria, finely ground green-tea powders, microencapsulated capsaicinoids, algae and myriad other plant extracts, flavor-masking technologies dialed down to applications, proteins, and exotic berry ingredients—among scores of others—intertwine into an arabesque of prognostication, in the right light and from the right angle yielding rarefied glimpses of the future, filling existing niches that grow into trends, and transforming trends into bona fide categories.

Such a stage is intimidating for attendees, as well, but tools like the new Taste of SupplySide (expect this food-centric feature to grow in the coming years), highlighted notes of interest via the Show eDaily, and the detailed search feature helped keep folks focused.

Feedback from exhibitors and attendees this year was unwaveringly positive. The addition of key technological tools and a now-entrenched food component have transformed SupplySide West into a truly major ingredient show that deftly crosses—and sometimes blurs—the lines defining nutraceuticals and food. The show was bigger than ever this year—quite a feat in a transitional economy where travel budgets remain downsized and our industry’s gainfully employed individuals often perform double-duty on a daily basis.

In the end, the show’s detailed views of individual trees comprising cutting-edge and long-proven ingredients and processes from around the world coalesce into a panoramic forest housing healthy concerns like sustained and differentiated energy (this is not your son’s Red Bull), weight management (truly efficacious ingredients), cognitive function (sharper smarts for everyone from toddlers through seniors) and immunity (improved overall health for a better quality of life, throughout life). Each attendee and exhibitor inevitably walks away from SupplySide with their own perspective on this thriving, healthy forest. And every year, more trees add depth and nuance to the views. Snapshots attempt to recreate the intricate detail of such vistas, but only those who were there truly have them ingrained into memory.

If you didn’t attend SupplySide West this year, find a colleague or two who did (you shouldn’t have to look too far) and ask them their opinion yourself. You’re sure to be intrigued by the response. And then I bet I’ll see you—and your colleagues—next year, deep in the glittering forest of Las Vegas, amazingly healthier for that handful of days in October (20 to 22 in 2010, to be exact).