Food City: 5 NYC Makers to Try

New York City was once the nation's food capital. Can that day ever return? It's possible. But it will look very different.

Huge companies were born and headquartered here in the early 20th century—Nabisco, Boar’s Head, Rheingold Beer, many more. Domino Sugar—once the largest sugar refinery in the world—dominated the East River waterfront.

Famous foods were invented here—the Oreo cookie, the Coney Island Hot Dog, Baked Alaska at Delmonico’s, Red Velvet Cake and Waldorf Salad at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, Chicken and Waffles at Wells Supper Club in Harlem.

But after World War II, different segments of the food industry hit hard times. Many renowned restaurants closed, and others struggled. Food corporations started to leave New York, and manufacturing declined precipitously.

Today, New York's food industry employs some 750,000 workers via 40,000 businesses. The annual output of food manufacturing exceeds $5 billion of gross sales to local, domestic, and foreign buyers. Unlike the giants of the past, today's food businesses tend to be small, specific, and independently owned. Many are start-ups facing the obstacles all start-ups face. But in their corner are New York's many food festivals like NYC Wine & Food Festival, season markets like Brooklyn's Smorgasburg, and industry shows, like the Summer Fancy Food Show (SFA) at the Javits Center.

The largest food industry event in North America, SFA showcases specialty foods from all over the world, and offers vital exposure to companies of all sizes, but especially start-ups and small businesses lacking the resources to promote themselves on their own. Here are a few of the New York-based companies we discovered at this year's festival:

Fine & Raw

"Be in love with the chocolate you eat," says Daniel Sklaar, founder and CEO of Fine & Raw, a Brooklyn-based bean-to-bar chocolate company. Bars, chunkies, truffles, spreads. Fine & Raw pretty much produces all known chocolate products. Founded in 2007 in what Sklaar calls "a notorious loft" in Williamsburg, the company is committed t0 artisanal production methods, organic ingredients, and direct relationships with its cocoa farmers in Ecuador. (Cocoa is native to Ecuador, which is the world's leading producer of the "fino de aroma" cocoa used by Sklaar. Recent archaeological discoveries have determined that the heritage of fine-aroma cocoa goes back some 5,300 years, according to UNESCO.)

"Fine and Raw’s factory is in the formerly gritty, now gentrifying Bushwick neighborhood and smells of earthy roasted cacao beans," says Forbes Magazine. "The renovated industrial space has a storefront shop, despite minimal foot traffic. It’s dotted with pallets piled with huge burlap sacks filled with cacao beans." 

An immigrant from South Africa, Sklaar has embraced the diversity and complexity of his neighborhood: “One of the best parts of running a business in Bushwick is the incredible sense of community and creativity here. It's a neighborhood full of people making interesting things. The downside is that some people in Manhattan still think Bushwick is too far away. And, like most New York City businesses, we’re always bursting at the seams, dreaming of a little more space.”

Anjali's Cup

Anjali's Cup's signature product is a Turmeric Elixir that founder Anjali Bhargava developed to deal with her own chronic health issues, especially migraine headaches. She says that Turmeric Elixir is super-easy to use and is suitable for dealing with sore muscles, cramps, even hangovers: "It's the friend you want to have on hand any time you're not feeling great." Or, as Jennifer Magazine noted, "Turmeric Elixir is the anti-oxidant we all need and love."

Turmeric is part of Anjali's reliance on Ayurveda, an ancient Indian medical system and holistic healing approach taught to her by her mother.

Anjali’s Cup also sells chai masala—spice blends that can be added to tea, coffee, or granola. The chai masala comes in two flavors, one with extra ginger, the other with turmeric and saffron.

“I'm super blessed to be in New York City with a business that’s New York born and bred,” says Anjali Bhargava. "The incredible advantage here is the people, the New Yorkers you can partner with.” One of Anjali's most successful partnered products is the habanera sauce she's holding up, having partnered with her friend Diana Beshara, flavor connoisseur of Catina Royal, which calls itself "Brooklyn born, but Mexican inspired."

Five Acre Farms

Five Acre Farms is one of those rare enterprises that restores your faith in human nature. Their products—milk, half & half, heavy cream, buttermilk, yogurt, kefir, cage free eggs, apple juice, apple sauce and seasonal apple cider—are superb. All are sourced and produced within a 275 miles radius of Five Acre Farms' Brooklyn headquarters. Its egg and dairy products can be traced back to the farms that produced them. Just look on the back of the product, where the farmer's name is listed. Oran B. Hesterman, CEO of the Fair Food Network, calls Five Acres' system "grocery store simplicity with farmers' market accountability."

Or, as Dan Horan, Five Acre Farms CEO, wrote to the New York Times about a piece that had criticized dairy farmers: The route forward is to "find great farmers who use sustainable practices and treat their herds with care, pay them a fair price that recognizes their efforts, and reintroduce them to consumers." Which is exactly what Five Acre Farms does. “We’re a local food company,” summarizes Horan, “that brings local food into mainstream markets.”

Horan's products have been recommended by many food experts, including Martha Stewart, who is especially enamored of Five Acre buttermilk, the "worker bee of baking."

You can buy Five Acre products at the best stores: Zabar's, Fairway Chelsea, Amish Market, Westerly, Grace's Marketplace, Sahadi's, and many more.

 Seed + Mill

Based in Chelsea Market's main concourse, Seed + Mill is a sesame concept store, the first in the country dedicated to sesame products. Seed's fresh artisanal halva, a traditional MiddleEastern sweet, is handmade and comes in over 30 flavors.

Equally important is Seed 's tahini, a ground sesame paste that has been essential to cooking across the Levant since at least the 13th century. Sesame itself has been harvested for some 4,000 years. Herodotus wrote about sesame crops along the Tigris and Euphrates 3,500 years ago. The nutritional value is extraordinary. It's packed with protein, 4.7 grams of protein per ounce. When compared to other nuts and seeds, sesame seeds have the highest percentage of phytosterols, plant compounds that help reduce cholesterol. Sesame seeds are rich in copper, a trace mineral known to be anti-inflammatory, and calcium, helping in preventing osteoporosis and migraines.

We've written about sesame and tahini before, and agree with The Chalk Board's assessment that with Seed + Mill we "found that we’d stumbled straight into superfood heaven."

Huwa Extra Virgin Olive Oil

"I'm here because of the Queens Economic Development Corporation," says Bilal Othman Huwaoushi: "They gave us a community grant that helped us start selling our olive oil locally." QEDC's Entrepreneur Space is a business incubator in Long Island City that has the longest-running shared commercial kitchen operating in New York. It has supported over 850 food start-ups, including Huwa.

Huwa used the Queens grant to improve distribution. Before, Bilal's family sold their olive oil in 17-liter vats through a WhatsApp group chat.

Acclaimed by Eater as the olive oil "to rival (or even replace) Graza," Huwa Extra Virgin has an unusually acerbic, peppery kick that builds on the palate. Bilal attributes this to the terroir of the West Bank near the Jordan Valley where the Huwaoushi olive grove is located. Single origin, cold-pressed, and ethically sourced, the olive oil is harvested with the same techniques used in the area for thousands of years. The olives are hand-picked from ladders rather than violently shaken by a machine.

No pesticides are used. Instead, the Huwaoushis plant fig trees in the groves to attract pests away from the olives and fertilize the soil. The groves aren't irrigated. The Huwaoushis rely on rainfall to preserve the soil and produce the best olives.