Usually, when AnaMaria Friede goes to the Fancy Food Show — the trade show for makers of specialty foods and the stores that sell them — the first thing she does is flip over her badge so her name can’t be seen. It’s better for her to slip under the radar as she walks the 363,000 square feet of booths at New York’s Javits Center, sampling gluten-free brownies and fair-trade coconut water and vegetable chips, so many vegetable chips.
That’s because Friede is a buyer for the Mid-Atlantic region of Whole Foods Market, responsible for deciding which packaged cookies or frozen mac-and-cheese or jarred olives, among other things, you’ll pluck from the shelves of your local store.
Whole Foods, which has more than 435 stores and sold $15.4 billion worth of goods in the 2015 fiscal year, is “the barometer for if you’ve made it in your business,” said exhibitor Benjamin Frohlichstein, co-founder of Cappello’s, a sleekly designed line of gluten-free pizzas and doughs sold in some Whole Foods regions. “If we were coming to the show and we weren’t in Whole Foods yet, we would be desperate.”
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