Half-Popped Corn Is the Newest American Snack Food Trend

Those final-round, half-popped remnants of the once-brimming popcorn bag have a solid fan base it seems, with two companies (two!) now selling bags of almost-there popcorn.

Washington-based company HalfPops and Minnesota-based company Pop'd Kerns have decided that fully-popped kernels are wildly overrated, now selling half-popped corn as an actual snack. Their premature little bag buddies make for quite the potentially teeth-breaking snack, selling 170-gram bags at over 2000 locations America-wide and online (not for international delivery yet, so we'll have to live with the few skerricks in our popcorn bags for now).

How the companies purposely half-pop the corn isn't made entirely clear on either of their websites, so we're willing to conjure up an image of the team hiding behind unsuspecting popcorn eaters and stealing their bags when they're almost done. Hiiiiiissssss, the sweet, sweet half-popped gold!

The partially-popped friends made a strong appearance at New York City's Summer Fancy Food Show, the city's first ever specialty food week. Taking over NYC's Javits Centre from June 28 to 30, the inaugural SFFS15 nabbed the title of largest specialty food trade event in North America; a leading showcase of food industry innovation. For three days, American foodies found themselves surrounded by the newest and weirdest edible developments in the game.

Half-popped corn wasn't the only thing turning heads at SFFS15. Probably the most grown-up type of ice cream in the freezer, wine ice cream is the work of an upstate New York dairy called Mercer's. Don't think this is simply wine-flavoured, these creamy, creamy confections have up to five percent alcohol. Other 'fancy foods' making waves at the specialty food week included the controversial maple water, tomato butter and the retch-inducing camel milk. Like, milked from a camel. Yeesh.

Via The Kitchn.