The sofi Awards, the Fancy Food Show and the Good Food Awards
A fine food shop's buyer walks the aisles of a trade show the way a scout walks a minor-league ballpark: mostly ignoring the signs, tasting everything, and paying attention to a small number of seals that mean a product has already survived a blind panel. In the United States there are two. The sofi Award comes from the trade association that runs the country's biggest specialty food show and has been awarded since 1972. The Good Food Award comes from a nonprofit that will not give a seal on taste alone; it checks how the food was made first. Between them they cover most of what is worth knowing about American craft food awards, and this guide explains how each works, how they differ from the European stickers in our Great Taste guide, and what to make of the seal on a jar.
The Fancy Food Show
The Specialty Food Association is the trade body for American specialty food, the makers, importers, distributors and retailers of the things our shelves are made of, and its Fancy Food Show, held each summer in New York and each winter in Las Vegas, is where the industry meets. Thousands of exhibitors, from a two-person jam company to the importers of European brands, set up tables of samples, and buyers walk for days tasting. Most of the products on a shop like ours were first tasted at a show. It is exhausting, overlit and indispensable, and the sofi Awards are its centerpiece.
The sofi Awards
The name is short for Specialty Outstanding Food Innovation, and the awards go back to 1972. Members of the association enter products in dozens of categories, from chocolate to condiments to snacks to non-alcoholic beverages, and each category is judged blind by a panel of chefs, buyers, food writers and culinary professionals who taste the products decanted and numbered, scoring on flavor, texture, aroma and appearance and on how well the product does what it claims. Winners are announced in gold, silver and bronze per category, with a single product of the year chosen from the golds, and the results are published with the maker's name. The seal is a round gold or silver medallion that a maker can print on the label for that product and year.
Two things to know. First, entry is limited to association members, which means the field is the industry rather than the whole world; a small European house that does not sell in the American market will never appear. Second, the categories are many and the entries per category can be modest, so a bronze in a thin category is a smaller achievement than a gold in a crowded one. The seal is a solid signal of quality within American specialty retail; it is not a global ranking.
The Good Food Awards
The Good Food Awards began in San Francisco in 2011 with a different premise: that a food award should reward how something is made as well as how it tastes. Entries are judged blind by category, chocolate, coffee, cheese, preserves, pantry, spirits, confections, snacks, and the rest, by panels of chefs, makers and writers, and the highest scorers become finalists. Then the finalists are vetted. The organization checks ingredient sourcing, labor practices, environmental claims and transparency against published standards for each category, and a product that tastes superb but cannot show where its cacao or its sugar came from does not get the seal. Winners are announced in a ceremony in the new year and carry a seal that says Good Food Award with the year.
The vetting is the point. In categories like chocolate, where our fermentation piece and producer guides explain how much depends on paying farmers well, a Good Food Award tells a buyer that a maker's sourcing story has been checked by someone other than the maker. It is the closest thing American craft food has to a combined taste-and-ethics seal, and it is why a shop that cares about the second half of that phrase watches it.
How they differ from the European awards
The Great Taste Awards are open to anyone, judged on taste alone, and scaled by stars; the sofi Awards are open to members, judged on taste and category fit, and scaled by medal; the Good Food Awards are open to American makers, judged on taste and then on sourcing, and pass or fail. The olive oil competitions in our judging guide use a trained sensory method with a fixed vocabulary; the chocolate awards use a similar one. None of them is a ranking of the world's best; each is a filter that a product passed on a given day in a given year, and a seal on a jar is strongest when it is recent and from a competition you can look up.
How to read the seal
Look for the year, which is on the sofi medallion and the Good Food seal and is the first thing that makes it a claim rather than decoration. Look up the category, since a gold in chocolate bars means something different from a gold in gift baskets. Remember what each seal checks: a sofi checks taste against the American trade, a Good Food Award checks taste and then sourcing. And weigh it against the rest of the label exactly as our tinned fish label guide weighs a medal against a piece count: the seal is one line among several, and the ingredient list, the origin and the maker's name outrank it.
Why a shop watches them
Because they save tasting time, and because the makers who enter them are, on average, the makers who care. A new American jam with a Good Food Award goes to the front of the tasting queue; a chocolate bar with a sofi gold gets opened first. Neither guarantees a place on the shelf, since the taste at our counter decides that, but both raise the odds.
