By Denise Shoukas

The Royal Doughnut
Visualize Harrods world-renowned Food Hall in London, then picture Prince Charles snacking on a hot, American-inspired doughnut at the royal family’s favored shopping spot. It may be a legitimate sighting when the first U.K. location of Krispy Kreme (www.krispykreme.com) opens in London this month. The U.S.-based doughnut retailer plans to open 25 locations over a five-year period in the U.K. and Ireland.

The familiar “Hot Doughnuts Now” sign will alert the British to hot batches of doughnuts, which will be accessible through the Harrods Food Hall as well as a street entrance. Serving fresh hot Krispy Kreme doughnuts beginning at 7 a.m. daily, the store will feature Krispy Kreme’s doughnut-making theatre, allowing people to see the doughnuts being made from start to finish. An estimated 7.5 million Krispy Kreme doughnuts are eaten everyday, totaling more than 2.7 billion annually.

Astronaut-Friendly Food
You may never fly to outer space, but at least you can eat like an astronaut. Food science and nutrition students from Chapman University in Orange, Calif., won the NASA 2003 Product Development Competition for their Pizza Poppers. Presented at the Inter-national Food Technol-ogist Conference in Chicago in July, Pizza Poppers (available in original pizza flavor, garlic, and hot and spicy) met strict NASA standards. They are easy to prepare, generate minimal waste, yield no crumbs, provide high nutritional value, and are based on crops potentially grown in outposts on the Moon and Mars (tomatoes, wheat, onions and herbs).

These bite-size, nutritious snacks don’t contain chemical additives and utilize okara and waste water, both by-products of soymilk processing. Vacuum-packed for space travel, they will appeal to common Earth travelers due to their good taste, convenience and long shelf-life.

Juice Goes Super Premium
Blood orange juice made from fruit grown on the slopes of Mt. Etna in Sicily has hit the shelves in the U.S. Organic Volcano Orange Juice™ from Dream Foods (www.dreamfoods.com) is made from three varieties of blood oranges, including Taroccos, which are rare and impossible to find outside of Sicily. The juice is recognized by the European Union with the coveted Indicazione Geografica Protetta (IGP) seal, which is similar to DOC labeling given to wines. Versatile as well as delicious, the juice can also be used in salad dressings, sauces, desserts and cocktails.

Long-Lasting Onions
The days of tossing out unused, dried-out onions are over. When stored in optimum conditions, the Hat Trick Premium Wonderful Washington Sweet Onion, developed by Hatco Packing Co./Hatch Farms of Pasco, Wash., (www.hatcopacking.com), will last close to eight months (two to four months in warm and humid climates). By increasing the sugar content to close to 10 percent, the onions are sweeter and last longer. They are packaged in 10- and 40-pound boxes, instead of sacks. Consumers who choose Walla Walla Sweet Onions or Vidalia Sweet Onions—and those who want a long-lasting, sweet onion—will welcome this innovation.

A Twist on Pretzels
A Hempzel (www.hempzels.com) is a traditional Pennsylvania pretzel with a twist: It’s made from hemp, which is a vegetable similar to flax, and also used to make cloth, paper and paints. Why bother? Added nutritional value for one thing. According to nutritionists, hemp seeds are high in protein, fiber, potassium, vitamin E, vitamin C, vitamin Bs, phosphorus, magnesium, iron, zinc and copper, and contain today’s darling essential fat, Omega-3. The Hempzels offer a nuttier taste than traditional pretzels and are available in original, sesame, jalapeño and garlic, and as soft Hempzels.

A federal appeals court recently overturned a Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) ban on the sale of food containing the marijuana relative hemp, countering a 2001 DEA declaration that foods containing even trace amounts of THC, the psychoactive chemical found in marijuana, be banned under the Controlled Substances Act. The amount of hemp used in foods does not contain enough THC for any hallucinogenic effect.

Low-Cholesterol Eggs
The market for designer eggs has cracked wide open. The newest development is the low-cholesterol egg, as reported in The Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry published by the American Chemical Society. To produce the eggs, Pan Tzu-ming, a professor at the Institute of Microbiology and Biochemistry at the National Taiwan University, added red yeast rice, a traditional Chinese ingredient for food coloring and a herbal remedy that has been scientifically proven to lower cholesterol, to the feed of 48 42-week-old egg hens. Six weeks later, the cholesterol levels in the eggs laid by those hens declined by 6 percent, to 14 percent. But the low-cholesterol eggs do come with a price—at least double the retail of ordinary eggs.

Say Cheese…and Chocolate?
You don’t have to sniff around too much to smell where artisan chocolate is headed. There’s even now a truffle made of cheese and chocolate. Chocolatier Katrina Markoff, owner of Vosges Haut-Chocolat (www.vosgeschocolate.com), has opened a chocolate boutique in Manhattan’s SoHo (joining her Chicago posts). She debuted her Vincent Gallo Collection in September. The cheese truffle is filled with Italian Taleggio cheese, organic walnuts, Tahitian vanilla beans and bittersweet dark chocolate. The esoteric collection also includes: white chocolate and olive oil topped with dried Kalamata olives; dark chocolate with aged Balsamic vinegar and hazelnuts; and Sicilian sea salt added to burnt sugar caramel in a milk chocolate truffle and finished with a pine nut.

Denise Shoukas is a contributing editor for Specialty Food Magazine.