Editors Select the 57 Best Foods to Buy Right Now(New York) – Cooking Light (www.CookingLight.com) today announced its third Annual Taste Test Awards, also known as “The Tasties,” which name the best-tasting and healthiest grocery store products and stand-out artisanal treats from across the country in 19 categories. The feature appears in the October issue, on newsstands Friday, September 14 and available online at CookingLight.com/TasteTestAwards.

For the artisanal category, the Cooking Light editors, along with a team of regional food experts, sampled everything from wild chokecherry jelly to smokehouse brisket. In the three years since Cooking Light began giving these awards, the number of small-batch food producers has grown deliriously, and so has the quality of their product. Twenty-seven winning products were chosen across six categories: Condiments, Sweets, Cheese, Booze, Meat, and Best of the Rest.

For the grocery category, the Cooking Light editors did an exhaustive search to come up with this year’s list of 30 winning products in 13 categories including: Semisweet Chocolate Chips (Hershey’s Special Dark), Smooth Almond Butter (MaraNatha All-Natural No-Stir), Bottled Flavored Green Tea (Arizona Green Tea with Ginseng and Honey), Fat-Free Strawberry Greek Yogurt (Chobani), Frozen Vegetable Lasagna (Michael Angelo’s Natural Vegetable Lasagna), and many more. In each category, one Grand Prize Winner is selected as well as one or more Taste Test Award Winners.

To qualify for the grocery category, products must be available in most major markets nationwide. Products that contained artificial trans fats, too much salt, or too much saturated fat were eliminated. Then a tasting panel of Cooking Light editors and registered dieticians did a blind taste-test of 200 finalists to come up with this year’s list.

“Cooking Light’s Taste Test Awards illustrate exactly what we’ve been telling consumers for the past 25 years—healthy is delicious,” says Cooking Light editor Scott Mowbray. “From kitchen staples and lunch bag snacks in the grocery category to decadent cheeses and indulgent sweets in the artisanal category, this year’s winning products are stand-outs in the ever-growing world of food products.”

For the full list of winners, go to:

• 2012 Grocery category – CookingLight.com/Grocery2012
• 2012 Artisanal category – CookingLight.com/Artisanal2012

**Editors, Registered Dieticians and Chefs Available for Interviews**About Cooking Light

At 25 years, Cooking Light is the nation’s leading epicurean magazine brand with the largest audience and most epicurean editorial. Cooking Light is the only epicurean brand positioned at the intersection of great-tasting food and healthfulness, serving an important and growing consumer need. The brand delivers innovative recipes, nutrition advice, and resources to live a healthful lifestyle via its magazine, Web site, and portfolio of cookbooks; across all tablets; through the highly-acclaimed Cooking Light Quick and Healthy Menu Maker app; and on social media platforms including, Facebook (Facebook.com/CookingLight), Twitter (@Cooking_Light), Pinterest (Pinterest.com/CookingLight) and Instagram. Cooking Light is part of the Time Inc. Lifestyle Group, a division of Time Inc., the largest magazine media company in the U.S.

Contacts:

Erin Clinton, 212.522.2710 erin_clinton@timeinc.com
Sarah Lustberg, 212-522-0108 sarah_lustberg@timeinc.com