Trade Shows

Speciality Bites with

Paul Hargreaves

Chief executive of Cotswold Fayre

• Becoming a B Corp
• Top trend predictions for Christmas 2021
• Self-sacrifice: The importance of building a leadership legacy centred on others
• Undercover Boss
• Can/should bosses really be close friends with their staff?

Wow, that was quite a tough few weeks. I have been up and down the land with our 2016 Launch Events together with our 40 new suppliers for 2016. Chuck in Scotland’s Speciality Food Show for 4 days and the annual trip to Cologne for 3 days and my feet haven’t touched the ground. All in all though a great start to the year

Our new suppliers were absolute legends, some of them travelling a lot further than me in order to be at these events. Generally they hailed the shows as a great success as you simply can’t beat putting food and drink in the buyer’s minds in order to gain a sale.  It does, of course, help that we have some very high quality new lines!

One thing we did differently at these events was to have introductory offers and actually take orders at the shows, and as retailers could save themselves several day’s wages most of them did. Strangely I did pot a north/south divide here. A higher percentage placed orders immediately at the two northern events compared to the southern events. Does this tell us that northerners like a “deal” more than their southern counterparts? Maybe not but it was an interesting observation! 

As we advertised nationally in the trade press, of course, there were one or two freegans who turned up (definition of freegan:  people who attend trade events against the rules simply to grab as much free food and drink as they can). Being long in the tooth I can spot them a mile off, but some of our younger suppliers had their time wasted as they didn’t want to appear rude. I only evicted one person in the four events! One lady claimed that she had high street premises and was looking for food and drink to complement her existing business, which was, as we found out later, a launderette! Perhaps not the best lead of the day.

We will definitely do some more events like this. Customers loved the fact that there was not too much to see – only 40 stands. I think some of them are overwhelmed by the size of the larger events. Yet some of them stayed for 3 hours or more, so had a very good, in-depth look at the new brands. I have written about this before, but the proliferation of speciality food and drink shows means that each new one that starts up simply dilutes the effectiveness of the existing events. Retailers simply can’t spend all their time at trade shows. A well-known chain and customer of ours couldn’t event make the Scottish event on their doorstep as they were at Spring Gift Fair the following week. At least Farm Shop & Deli/Food & Drink Expo have made life easier for everyone this year as it clashes completely with the Natural & Organic Show at Olympia. Do they not work out these things together? Clearly not!

Have a good couple of weeks – February looks to be a good one for speciality food retailers.