We've just spent three days at the Birmingham Food and Drink Show where, in partnership with William Reed, we launched the inaugural Taste the Future awards. The competition ran across three days, 10 category rounds and 40 brands - with show visitors sampling products and scoring them live via Stickybeak on taste, packaging uniqueness and overall 'most exciting' in the category.
On Wednesday afternoon, the four highest-scoring brands pitched on The Grocer Stage to a panel of industry experts. The winner: MisoHeat - a miso-based chilli condiment born in a Denver, Colorado kitchen, now setting its sights on the UK.
Categories ranged from tea and coffee to confectionery, alcohol to world foods. In each round, four brands presented their products. Visitors scored them in real time, and the category winners progressed as finalists. The four brands with the highest scores overall earned the right to pitch live.
The four highest-scoring category winners pitched live on The Grocer Stage, each presenting to a panel of judges followed by a Q&A.
Our judging panel:
Lockdown Liquor & Co : Omar pitched the brand’s range of 100% natural pre-mixed cocktails, which started life during lockdown and now spans 19 flavours across multiple formats.
SMUG Dairy (Kerry Dairy Ireland) : Ross and Obi presented Cheese and Crunch, a low-fat Irish cheddar snack backed by 3,000 family farms in the southwest of Ireland.
Juggle Confectionery : Caroline made a strong case for a product that’s doing something genuinely different in the confectionery aisle: super juicy jellies with 10x more fruit juice than competitors, made from just eight or nine all-natural ingredients.
Miso Heat : Curtis has been a private chef in Denver for 15 years. He created MisoHeat almost by accident - a miso chilli condiment that became the runaway favourite at a supper club. Since launching in late 2019, the brand has grown to around 150 US stores including the Whole Foods Rocky Mountain region, with a range that now includes a Reaper edition, a mild version, a umami hot honey and a dehydrated powder for food service. Curtis describes it as “the future of salt and pepper” - a seasoning that brings umami depth and fresh pepper brightness to anything. The judges loved the chef authenticity and identified the UK as a real opportunity, encouraging Curtis to explore pricing, format and how to tell the origin story for a British audience.
Winner of the Stickybeak Prize Pack
When Stickybeak CEO Anna Henwood announced MisoHeat as the winner, Curtis was lost for words. Asked how he was feeling, he said: “There are no words.”
“It was wildly close in terms of products. We wish you all the best of success, but there can be only one winner.”— Anna Henwood, CEO, Stickybeak
The judges praised MisoHeat as a scalable opportunity with strong alignment to growing consumer appetite for umami-forward, chef-authentic condiments. With conversations already underway with Whole Foods UK and Harrods, and new formats in the pipeline, Curtis and theMiso Heat team are preparing for their UK debut.
Taste the Future wouldn’t work without brands willing to put their products to a live public vote. Congratulations to all 40 participants, to the 10 category winners and to the four grand finalists who stood out in what was an incredibly tight competition. We can’t wait to see where these brands go next.
Taste the Future is brought to you by Stickybeak and William Reed. See you next year.
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