WE TASTE THE WEIRD STUFFSO YOU DON'T HAVE TO.
Garden of Chow is a side project by two friends who work in marketing and spend too much of their free time hunting down strange food.
How it started
We already knew each other long before SIAL Paris. We're both marketers by trade, Florido builds things and Roger writes things, and we've spent years arguing about hot sauce at dinner tables. The idea for Garden of Chow landed in Paris, in 2024, somewhere between a shot of pickle brine and a gummy bear rated at nine million Scoville.
We walked the show for four days tasting everything that wasn't nailed down, and kept having the same thought: there's a whole world of incredible, funny, genuinely delicious food that most people will never find because it's buried on page seven of a shopping site. That felt wrong. So we built this place.
SIAL Paris 2024, reviewed
SIAL is the kind of place where you can go from a booth selling freeze-dried durian to a booth selling chili extract in about forty seconds. It's the biggest food trade show in the world, and it's basically a theme park for anyone who takes snacks too seriously.
The floor is overwhelming in the best way. Hall after hall of people who have dedicated their lives to one specific thing, and who will hand you a spoon and watch your face while you try it. The fermented herring guy, the gummy bear people, the hot sauce makers who smile as they tell you it's "medium." You can't fake enthusiasm in a room like that, and nobody there is faking it.
Meet the two of us
Florido Meacci
A creative technologist and developer by day, which is how this whole shop ended up built. He's also the one who swears every sauce "isn't that hot" right up until his eyes start watering, and the reason half our boxes lean spicy. His rule is simple: if it doesn't make you reach for a drink, what's the point?
Roger Matena
A creative copywriter by trade, so the words on this site actually read like a person wrote them. He's also the texture guy. He'll eat the weird stuff, but he has strong opinions about how it feels in your mouth. If a gummy is too firm or a chip isn't crunchy enough, you'll hear about it at length.
Why we do it
We live and breathe marketing by day. Garden of Chow is the fun part, the excuse to travel, walk a trade show floor, and taste weird shit from people who care about it as much as we do. We try and vet every product ourselves before it goes in a box, because that's the whole point of having the hobby in the first place.
Nothing gets in unless one of us would happily eat it again, or at least happily watch you try it. It has to be interesting, it has to taste good, and it has to make a good story at a dinner table.