Stamford, CT – March 18, 2011 – The Saffron Road™ brand made its official debut to the natural food trade at the recent Natural Products Expo West, the largest U.S. trade show for the natural food industry. The show, held in in Anaheim, California, hosted 3,533 exhibitors and more than 58,000 industry attendees.
Saffron Road’s booth was heavily-trafficked, with almost 3,000 samples served of the epicurean Indian delights of Saffron Road’s Chicken Tikka Masala, Chicken Biryani, Lamb Vindaloo, and Lamb Saag. Many of our booth’s visitors praised the brand for its pasture-raised and 100% vegetarian-fed livestock as these are often important to health conscious consumers. Saffron Road’s team was also pleasantly surprised at the numerous kudos it received for the brand’s recent Gluten-Free certification. Obviously, gluten-free products, which are growing at over 20% per year, are being much more widely accepted and Saffron Road felt once again that its management team’s decisions to innovatively position the Saffron Road brand in this category was endorsed by the huge positive consumer response at the Expo West show.
Adnan Durrani, CEO of American Halal (parent company of Saffron Road), said, “We had this intuitive vision over a year ago – that with Saffron Road we could build a Halal brand based on ethical consumerism, which embodied the timeless values of the natural food movement our team had embraced over the last two decades: antibiotic-free, hormone-free, sustainably-farmed, and Certified Humane®. I was so thrilled that our success at Expo West, the #1 Natural food show, totally validated that vision into a reality. At Saffron Road, we have already embarked on our journey of bringing together different cultures, faiths, natural foodies, and epicurean culinaries to celebrate our values. We look forward to emotionally connecting even more with our consumers and our mutual ethical ethos on the Saffron Road.”
In addition to its booth presence, Saffron Road also participated in a meeting of select industry leaders forming a coalition against genetically-modified foods, or the Non-GMO project (http://www.nongmoproject.org). Saffron Road will continue to follow this Non-GMO movement and was honored to have a seat at the table of this very important dialogue.
Jack Acree, EVP of American Halal said, “The response was quite gratifying, especially once attendees realized Saffron Road’s frozen entrées are one of the only ones that have livestock, which is raised without antibiotics. We were also very pleased with the reception at our booth by some major mainstream U.S. retailers. We are now even more confident of our plan to rollout into over 4,000 stores this year since the acceptance and retrial of our entrees has been exceptional.”
