Natural Products Expo West 2025: Egg White Chips, Oat Milk Sheets and Pizza Cupcakes
Somebody at Natural Products Expo West introduced a new flavor of coconut water. Somewhere there was a new gluten-free pastry. Somebody launched plant-based chicken nuggets. Ho-hum.
But if you knew where to look at this year’s show, little companies were inventing things like potato chips made of egg whites, oat milk “sheets” that you rehydrated at home and pizza cupcakes.
They’ll probably never be billion-dollar brands, and they’re not the kinds of new products that any sane big company would undertake. But a few years back at this show, somebody had the crazy ideas to put prebiotics in soda, to slip ice cream into a rice flour dumpling and to create a Greek style of yogurt.
The 2025 edition of Natural Products Expo West notched another successful event March 5-7, with 64,000 attendees and 3,000 exhibitors, 900 of them first-timers, taking all available space in the Anaheim (Calif.) Convention Center. All those figures are about the same as last year’s.
Each year, the show becomes a little more corporate and maybe a little less “natural,” with some food and beverage processors stretching the natural definition, and ingredient suppliers and other service providers – even a small handful of equipment builders – growing in number. But for every Conagra, Chobani and Kellanova, there are 20 or more Almond Brothers, Chef Bobos and Fly By Jings.
The ideal attendees are buyers for grocery stores, but every year also sees more private equity bankers and Big Food acquisitions people looking for the next Poppi (which was just bought by PepsiCo for $1.95 billion) or Happy Baby/Happy Family (bought by Danone 12 years ago). Both are past attendees.
Despite the current interest in prebiotic sodas, there seemed to be fewer carbonated soft drinks this year – last year we highlighted a plethora of sodas. Poppi took a pass, as did Wild Wonder, a prebiotic pop exhibiting last year, although Culture Pop, another emerging prebiotic soda, was still there.
Bloom Nutrition, which has been known for mix-it-yourself colostrum and collagen peptides and “greens & superfoods,” showed prototypes of Bloom Pop, promised for a Labor Day launch, which will have prebiotics, 40 calories and 4g of sugar.
Proteins were everywhere, but “alternative proteins” were no longer promoted as the headliner. We saw only one mention of "ancient grains," and that was from an ingredient company.
It seemed a lot of things were labeled "real," and that almost always meant animal proteins: real cheese, real meat, real dairy.
Two hot trends appeared to be absent. There was only a small handful of products appealing to users of GLP-1 weight drugs, but we expected more. Nobody seemed to be touting "made with AI/artificial intelligence” – maybe that’s not natural enough or just marketing-speak. Nothing with CBD, a popular ingredient from a few years ago, although last year we saw one CBD product.
Asian flavors of all kinds are still popular; other international flavors too. We noticed a kimchi salsa. This long-running flavor trend still has legs as Gen Zs start to buy groceries.
Some interesting products at the show:
*Egglife, which in 2019 debuted tortilla-like wraps made of egg whites (therefore gluten-free), this year sliced them into pastas, which deliver twice the protein but 90% fewer carbohydrates than conventional pasta.
*Egg whites also found their way into potato chip-like snacks in the booth of Gala Foods’ Just This High Protein Egg White Chips.
*Milkadamia showed do-it-yourself oat milk sheets. A 2D-printing process creates sheets of dried oat milk; consumers rehydrate them with water to create “fresh” oat milk on demand, in the process cutting packaging waste by 94% and weight by 85%.
*Long known for its almond-, oat- and coconut-based “milks,” Califia Farms showed a line of Refreshers. Still starting with plant-based milks, the coolers come in pina colada, key lime, orange crème and strawberry crème.
*Lifeway Foods, which brought kefir to America, launched salad dressings based on the fermented milk drink. Flavors are avocado chipotle, green goddess, Seemingly Ranch and Dreamy Caesar.
*The Pizza Cupcake Co. may have created a new category with its eponymous product. As the name implies, it’s crusty dough, marinara and mozzarella but in the shape of a cupcake, easy for eating on the go and with a unique flavor.
