A Look At Supermarkets Of The '90S -- Aisle After Aisle Of Grocery Displays

Times staff reporter Judith Blake is in Chicago to cover a convention of 32,000 people in grocery industry.

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CHICAGO - Green and lean.

These are a couple of ideas getting heavy play here this week as the massive American food industry shows its stuff, offering a preview of what's to come in your neighborhood supermarket.

Green is in style as an environmental mood sweeps the country - including grocery stores - in the early 1990s.

And lean is everywhere in lower-fat foods that producers hope will attract the cash of health-conscious consumers.

The two trends are visible to anybody trudging the miles of aisles at Chicago's McCormick Place trade center, site of the supermarket industry's huge annual convention and trade show. More than 32,000 grocers and manufacturers are here to see what's new in food.

What's new is not only green and lean, of course. For instance, coffee-loving Seattle might take an interest in - if not a liking to - something called iced coffee, a syrupy-sweet form of the brew that comes in a can, like soda pop. Iced coffees are a big hit in Asia, said a sales agent for Jamaican Gold, which is introducing its iced coffee in the U.S.

And oat-bran products, which flooded supermarkets last year and included such dubious entries as oat-bran potato chips, are still showing up at the trade show despite conflicting studies on oat bran's ability to lower cholesterol. Among the recent offerings: an oat-wheat-flour blend from General Mills.

Meanwhile, rice bran, also touted for its cholesterol-lowering talents in some studies, is making a play for oat bran's turf. For instance, Nature's Path, a natural-foods manufacturer based in Vancouver, B.C., came to the Chicago show with two new rice cereals, Crispy Organic Rice and Brown Rice Flakes.

Less healthful but offering a different kind of appeal are Mr. Crispy's French Fries, dispensed by a vending machine that fries them as you watch - after you deposit a dollar. Being introduced in the U.S. by a Canadian company, the machine takes its place in the growing trend toward ready-to-eat supermarket food.

When it comes to trends, however, none seems fatter than low-fat foods - or foods that at least are leaner than they used to be. It's all part of the dream of countless eaters: foods that taste fat but count out lean.

It's been a largely elusive dream for years, but is approaching reality in such products as ice cream and ice milk. One of these at the Chicago show is Swenson's Light Super Premium Ice Milk. The Sticky Chewy Chocolate flavor, for example, tastes smooth and rich like a high-fat ice cream but contains half the fat of Swenson's regular ice cream.

Other entries in the lower-fat or no-fat sweepstakes: Simple Pleasure, the frozen dessert made with Simplesse, the new fake fat; Kraft's Sealtest Fat Free Frozen Dessert; and Country Crock cheese spreads, promoted as having 25 percent less fat than other cheese spreads.

As for the environmental movement's Green Revolution, it's showing up at this convention in the growing concern over what food comes in - all those packages and cans and boxes and bags.

It's a concern many consider worth cultivating because the vast quantities of packaging materials that encase American foods gobble up resources and take up space in garbage dumps.

Attempting to get green in Chicago was Seattle supermarket executive Doyle Belnap, meat supervisor for Food Giant Stores. Belnap said he hoped the trade show would include some alternatives to the plastic-foam containers often used for meat.

The environmentally centered bag war at the checkout stand is clearly evident at this convention. Plastic is duking it out with canvas and the traditional brown paper sack to be the bag of choice.

BYOB - bring your own bag - is the motto for Continental Extrustion Corp.'s plastic Superbag, which can hold more than 30 pounds of groceries and be reused 10 to 20 times, the company claims. The idea is to cut down on the pile-up of non-degrading plastic in garbage dumps.

U.S. Plastics Corp. claims its plastic bags are 100 percent recyclable - provided there's a market, which a company representative said there doesn't seem to be just yet. ``We're not the bad guys,'' he said. ``Paper takes up a great deal more room'' in landfills.

Stylishly designed, reusable canvas bags are also being touted for the environmentally concerned grocery shopper.

The convention, which continues through Wednesday, will include seminars on other ways the food industry can get in the swing of the environmental movement.