By EJ Linehan
The Biena team invaded the Natural Products Expo East from September 13-16. The 32nd annual event was held at the Baltimore Convention Center in Maryland, featuring more than 1,500 brands and 29,000 community members. While this wasn’t the first time Biena Snacks attended the expo, this was the first time we featured our new Chocolate line!
Biena was humbled by our first nomination for a NEXTY Award in the “Best New Sweet Snack” category for our Chocolate line. The NEXTY Awards, as described by Expo East, “recognize the most progressive, innovative, inspiring and trustworthy products in the natural products industry.” Our Chocolate line made us proud!
The founder and CEO of Biena, Poorvi Patodia, was a guest speaker at the The Nutrition Capital Network (NCN) Health & Wellness Investor Forum. Poorvi shared her perspective on closing an investment deal, as she recently secured Series A funding with Tastemaker Capital. She was joined onstage by Matt Clifford of Barnana and Dan Aziz of Premama.
The real excitement of attending Expo East happens when meet people from our demo booth! The Biena team gets to see the faces of people trying our flavored chickpeas for the first time. It warms our hearts when someone truly enjoys the snacks we work so hard to make. Even repeat visitors from last year were treated to something new as we debuted our new Chocolate Line. Wait, did we already mention that? Sorry. We are just so excited about it!
The entire Biena staff would like to thank the many people who left us glowing reviews on social media. Personalities and bloggers such as Arielle Says from Buzzfeed’s Goodful, Sophie from Tracking is the New Black, and Lauren Harris-Pincus made our chickpeas blush with the wonderful reviews they left.
Already counting down the days until next year!