Natural Products Expo 2010

I'm home from the Natural Products Expo in Anaheim and finally have a minute to blog about it. Wow. What a fun experience!

A little background... The Natural Products Expo is the biggest of it's kind. It's put on by a local Colorado company -- New Hope Natural Media of Boulder. This year was the Expo's 30th anniversary and they drew a crowd of almost 56,000 attendees.

New Hope is the parent company of Delicious Living Magazine, who recently partnered up with my company, iVillage, to find out just what women are looking for when they do their grocery shopping. Admittedly, what I'm looking for is a bit different from our mainstream user. Most of us are looking for healthy food for our families, but our definitions of "healthy" vary widely (For example: "Lunchables" made the list of products that were viewed as healthy, yet I wouldn't let my kids touch them with a ten foot poll.) But the fact of the matter is that we are all consumers. What we look for isn't right or wrong...it just is.

At any rate, the results of this study were presented at the Natural Products Expo so that the companies attending could hear first hand what consumers are looking for. As part of the presentation, I was able to participate on a panel of moms interested in healthy living.

Besides being a fun experience in and of itself, I had the opportunity to meet some neat people! The CEO of the conference (and Penton Media which owns New Hope), Sharon Rowlands, kicked off our presentation; Nancy Coulter-Parker, Editor-In-Chief of Delicious Living Magazine, presented the findings of the study; and Catherine Balsam Schwaber, our CMO, participated in the presentation on behalf of iVillage. Catherine came from MTV where she worked on the Rock the Vote campaign (among some other really cool accomplishments).

Needless to say I was happy just to meet all of these people, never mind participating on the panel and getting to see the show.

More on all that later though...