Meagan McGinnes

The Project NOSH team walked miles of the show’s booth-lined aisles, which were filled with 3,100 exhibiting companies and over 80,000 attendees. The goal: to find new products that embody the natural food industry’s hottest trends — and five in particular stood out among the sea of booths.

The gluten-free baked goods line geared toward in-store bakeries introduced its products into Ahold USA earlier this month, bringing the company’s store count to over 2,000 eastern U.S. supermarkets since its 2015 launch. So far with 2017’s growth and Goodman’s new partnership with Ahold, the company has already done $500,000 in business from January through March.

This Saturday, some of food’s biggest names got in on the jokes, fooling consumers about everything from new services and dramatic name changes to “innovative” product launches and category jumps.

From conventional grocery to national coffee chains, natural brands are expanding their reach — and it’s still early in 2017. Here are some of the players making notable distribution growth.

An annual health and wellness progress report conducted by Consumer Goods Forum found that 66 percent of reporting companies reformulated products in 2016. But of those companies, roughly 27 percent made their policies regarding nutrition and product formulation public.

Earlier this month, State Senator Bob Wieckowski, a Democrat, introduced California SB 504, a bill that would require warning labels on all food containing synthetic dyes, including those sold in restaurants. It’s an issue that may cause food manufacturers to reconsider their use of synthetic colors not just in California, but nationwide.

How the refrigerated bar category Perfect Bar pioneered is growing, despite supply chain challenges and shrinking shelf space.

For the musicians, working with the San Francisco-based company is an opportunity to eat healthy on the road. For the food brands, it’s a way to market themselves and get endorsements from groups with a similar mission and larger audience reach. But for Founder Scott Manning, it’s more personal.

Greyston Bakery is advocating for inclusivity with both its newest product offering, grab-and-go cookies, and its longstanding hiring policy. The main motivation for the new line is the opportunity it offers to expand the company’s Open Hiring Model, which provides jobs to individuals with barriers to employment — no questions asked.

Applied Food Sciences (AFS) is going “back to the very beginning” — the beginning of food before genetic modification, that is. In January, the Austin, Texas-based ingredient supplier opened a research and development center at the University of Iowa’s BioVentures Center to use plant-based science to examine how the evolution of food shapes the current and future food supply.