Whole Foods Raw Fair

I hope everyone is having a wonderful weekend so far. I sure am! Our local Whole Foods had a Raw Foods fair today that I had a great time at sampling, listening and getting exposed to new products. I went to every demo both and sampled more a huge variety of raw treats, what a great lunch! I also took tons of pictures, literature and take-home samples. Whew, where to start?!

I stopped at the Alive & Radiant Foods booth multiple times and bought a bag of their cheesy kale chips because they were amazing … after I had two samples. The Raweo cookies were also great, but I’d be broke if I bought everything I liked! :-)

I was thrilled to see a Cafe Gratitude booth, I sampled everything and the chocolate chip ice cream was fantastic! I grabbed a few bumper stickers and love stickers that I adore and am thinking of adding to my collection of organic produce stickers on the side of my fridge.

Mmmm, Chocolatl raw chocolate, though I did not buy because I had to limit the amount of raw chocolate in my cart! :-) But, also because the samples were in messy shards, hard to grab and really taste.

I really liked Cosmic Kale Crunchies and ended up buying a bag of Cheesy Pizza Flavored kale chips which tasted surprisingly like pizza. If you’re a pizza/snack food fan trying to convert, these are great for occasional cravings. Just have the a vacuum ready when you’re finished :-)

Yeah, I sampled everything from this table :-) The Divine Organics Goji and Macadamia Chocolate Brittles were superb. Again, I had to hold back on buying too much chocolate reminding myself that I was getting enough of a chocolate fix today to last for a few months! :-P

I sampled a few of these Kaia Foods Fruit Leathers, but was not super impressed, they weren’t that sweet and were kinda flimsy. These would probably be a great snack for kids and the small, thin packaging makes them easy to carry in purses and baby bags for emergency snacks.

I sampled every L.O.V.E Cup from Chocolate Superfoods and ended up taking a Dark Cacao Cup home for hubby, but they were all good!

Lydia’s Organics had a wonderful table sampling crackers, cereals and crunch bars and I had to try at least one of everything. I really liked the Fiesta Crackers, Vanilla Crunch Cereal and Cacao Crunch Bars.

I got a few raw hemp seed sample packets from Manitoba Harvest, perfect for smoothies or salad toppings on the road.

The Righteously Raw table from EarthSource Organics was sinfully good because the bars were sampled in large square bites, easy for grabbing and really tasting each flavor. I ended up taking home a caramel bar for hubby.

I sampled many flavors from UliMana and thoroughly enjoyed them all! My favorites were the Goji Cherry Truffles and Dark Cacao Truffles.

The Ultimate Super Foods was another sinfully good booth because there were two reps creating custom sample raw sundaes in a Vita-Mix for customers and letting them pick their toppings. I had a green hemp topping on mine, wonderful!

The Zukay demonstration was very cool, I got to sample a few fermented veggie dips and an amazing banana acai hemp smoothie being whipped up on the spot.

I got a lot of loot from the fair and got to see many Vita-Mix’s in action. I also got to see and talk to many other raw foodies and I even ran into a few co-workers and friends just getting into it which was great! When I first arrived at 10 AM, it was not too packed, understandable for that early on a Saturday. But by noon, it was packed, demo seats were filled everywhere and overall the event seemed like a huge success. Very encouraging and I hope Whole Foods will continue to have more raw events.