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Last week, I was in New York City to attend two fantastic trade shows — 2024 Summer Fancy Food Show and Good Food Mercantile.

Whenever I go to these shows, I always come across some outstanding organic products, and this year was no exception.

Here are my Top 10 Organic Products of the 2024 Summer Fancy Food Show and Good Food Mercantile.

For those of us who are fans of Dr. Bronner’s, the company’s products have a constant presence in our households, and we use them to clean our bodies and physical surroundings on a daily basis.

While this is unquestionably a critical component of our lives and imperative to maintain good health, cleaning transcends removing whatever is on our skin, on our clothes or on our kitchen countertops. It also affects our emotional well-being and directly impacts how we show up in the world.

And this is precisely why Lisa Bronner’s Soap & Soul: A Practical Guide to Minding Your Home, Your Body and Your Spirit with Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps spoke to me so much, as it squarely touches on the importance of cleaning both the tangible and intangible — an essential formula for a meaningful life.

For as long as I have been covering the organic food industry, I have attended Natural Products Expo East, with my first show in Boston in 2009.

So, it is very bittersweet to report that after last week’s show in Philadelphia, there will be no more Expo East moving forward. New Hope, the organizer of the event, has decided to launch something new in 2024 called Newtopia Now.

If you are looking for organic fish in the U.S., you will not find it. Why?

Because there is no such a thing as USDA certified organic fish, as national organic standards for fish have not yet been approved.

That being said, some fish are certainly better to eat than others, and Food & Water Watch recently released its Smart Seafood Guide.

The Smart Seafood Guide gives an excellent analysis of over 100 different fish, provides regional guides, and offers helpful suggestions so that consumers can make the healthiest and most sustainable choices possible.

Natural Products Expo West, the largest organic trade show in the U.S., was held last week in Anaheim and attracted more than 65,000 visitors.

I came across some fantastic innovation at the show — a handful of products that I had never seen before and others that brought me back to my childhood.

Here are my Top 5 Organic Products of Expo West 2023:

Last April, I was in Denver attending the National Organic Standards Board meeting and went to dinner one night at True Food Kitchen.

Sitting at a community table, I struck up a conversation with a woman across from me and she proceeded to tell me that she had recently switched to a vegan diet.

“So, do you know Dr. Joel Kahn? The cardiologist from Detroit,” I asked.

Given that the plant-based world is a tight community and that Dr. Kahn is a social media star, I had a feeling that she might have known him.

“Do I know Dr. Kahn?” she responded with her face completely lit up. “He’s the reason I am a vegan today! Everything he talks about online and in his books convinced me to go plant-based!”

With the release of his excellent new book The Plant-Based Solution, Dr. Joel Kahn is looking to make a similar impact on many more people.

I recently caught up with my friend, and here is what he had to say.

Whenever I get asked the question of which are the best tasting organic foods, my response is always the same: the Biodynamic ones.

For quite some time, I have been wondering why exactly Biodynamic tastes so delicious, so I went digging for an answer.

THE BASICS

To understand why Biodynamic tastes so good and different from the rest, let’s first discuss its origins and then define it.

With celebrities rushing to invest in organic food companies these days, Sarah Michelle Gellar truly stands alone.

This long-time Hollywood actress isn’t writing a check, fading into the background and hoping for a payout several years down the line. She is doing the exact opposite.

Sarah Michelle Gellar is helping to run and is playing an active role in building one of the hottest organic food brands in the industry. Along with her two other co-founders, CEO Galit Laibow and COO Greg Fleishman, Foodstirs is redefining the healthy baking category by using the best organic and Biodynamic ingredients available.

In addition to her acting career and responsibilities at Foodstirs, this Emmy Award-winning actress and mother of two recently released Stirring up Fun with Food: Over 115 Simple, Delicious Ways to be Creative in the Kitchen, her #1 best-selling book. Organized by the month, Stirring up Fun with Food succeeds because of its approach — providing engaging “food-crafting” ideas that help kids develop self-confidence, creative thinking, and even math skills in the kitchen.

Having recently returned from Natural Products Expo West, a very intense and long five days visiting hundreds of trade show booths and meeting with dozens and dozens of people, one thing is very clear — I felt incredibly fortunate to have stayed in a Pure Room.

Launched by a company called Pure Wellness, a Pure Room is an extremely unique hotel offering that is addressing the needs of wellness-minded travelers in a way that I have never seen before. For people who place a serious priority on health, such as myself and many Living Maxwell readers, it is reassuring to know that this lifestyle can be maintained when on the road.

And now that I have stayed in a Pure Room on three separate occasions — most recently at two different hotels in the Los Angeles area for Natural Products Expo West — these hotel rooms have completely changed the way that I think about travel and how I book my accommodations.

Most people would probably say that choosing the best farmers market in the country would be based on selection, prices, quantity, how much is organic, crowds, and overall experience.

For me, it is much more simple.

Which farmers market will dictate my entire travel schedule just so I can be there for it?