To Your Heart’s Content

It’s that time of year again - well, yes, the holiday season and all… Christmas, Hanukkah, New Years, etc. But the Winter Fancy Food Show comes around in January on the West Coast. Normally it’s held in San Francisco, and later in the month. But this year it will be in lovely San Diego, and a bit earlier in the month, January 13-15th. We love going to the show, we’ve been going for several years and it’s the 3rd Fancy Food Show that we’ve exhibited our products. And if you spend any time at trade shows of any type, I can promise you that gourmet food shows are the Best Trade Shows Ever. I constantly recall my first trip to the Fancy Food Show where I learned that jumping from chocolates to bbq sauce to frozen latte to imported cheese to Australian wines for 8 hours will give you some serious stomach issues. Almost enough to keep you from doing it again a second day. By my second visit, I learned to focus: “Ok, the next 30 minutes I will focus on prosciutto”. Now I’ve learned to pick and choose carefully, and dive into only the really special stuff. Which I like to write up here.Exhibiting at these shows is just a blast, although 3 days on your feet in a booth is as draining as any other experience. We set up our little marshmallow roasting stations and pull people in with an innocent-sounding “would you like to roast a gourmet marshmallow?” In any other setting we’d have a 99% hit ratio, but in the world I just described, it’s closer to 10%. But the people who stop at our booth and try Plush Puffs are usually blown away, and we just love that. We make a lot of good contacts with stores and restaurants and caterers and take a lot of orders at the show.

So as this time of year rolls around, while we bask in the glow of the holidays, we’re also tasked with the fun job of preparing for a trade show. Anyone who’s ever had to be responsible for setting up a trade show booth knows the complexity. There are forms to be filled out, permits to be faxed, and fees to be paid. Gotta send in that fire permit so that we can use sterno. Gotta reserve that lead swipe machine so that we can gather information easily from the people who stop by our booth. Gotta arrange for the carpeting and the tables and the table skirts and the chairs and the waste basket. Need it? There’s a form for it. And then you pray that when you arrive, all your forms have been received and you don’t have to sit around for hours waiting for a union staplegunner to tack on some blue skirting around your table (which rents for about $100 a table, I might add). Just getting your stuff to the booth can be a chore, in many places you aren’t even allowed to carry your stuff to your booth, you’ve got to get a union forklift to bring everything in for you. At a charge of course. And then when it’s all over, stare at your email inbox waiting for your lead list to arrive, convinced that your list was the one they screwed up.

So we’ll be at booth 821 at the Winter Fancy Food Show this year in San Diego, January 13th-15th. Come on by, roast up a marshmallow, and see if our table skirts got installed this year.