new england foodservice expo

Written by: Thianh Lu on April 8th, 2008

with a beautiful day ahead of us, dave and I attended the new england foodservice expo in the search of new innovations, cool concepts and free food! the expo ends today so we missed many of the speakers and many vendors were winding down their kiosks and booths. the expo was nicely partitioned between food vendors (high end meats, cheeses, salmons, produce, prepared foods), technology (POS, handhelds, pagers, software), industrial equipment (mixers, washers, ovens, fryers), textiles (clothes, towels, Crocs!) and beverages (beer, liquor, coffee, drinks). the show seemed very upbeat as food defintely helped us move from station to station.

Here are a few overall thoughts that I had:

No Green: i thought that there would be more innovation in the way of green. the show was defintely missing or lacked marketing around new products that were better for the environment. maybe a new dishwasher that used less water or electricity, or a water system that circulated used hot water for other uses. we did see a vendor selling green food packaging that is a great alternative to styrofoam or other non biodegradable materials.

Sales: lots of the sales people we met with were either too busy chatting with other sales folks or looking at their watches waiting to leave. most of our questions were met with generic answers or pamphlets of information. we went to many booths and actually stood their and waited for a few minutes to no avail. to be fair we did meet lots of cool people who wanted to share their stories behind their business.

innovation?: i was really excited about seeing innovative new machines and products but there was nothing really ground breaking to speak of. there were many different variations of existing products but I have seen many of them before.

Overall it was fun and great opportunity to network and keep ontop of the foodservice industry…

Below are some pictures from the show..Enjoy!