lunch! – the innovative trade show – confirmed its position as the leading event for the out-of-home food and drink market last month following a successful 5th anniversary edition. Aimed at professional buyers looking to see the latest launches from the food-to-go sector’s most cutting-edge food, drink, packaging, equipment and technology suppliers, lunch! featured 236 exhibitors and attracted 4,314 attendees to the Business Design Centre in Islington, London.
This year’s show, which took place on 20-21 September, has been hailed a huge success, with 94% of visitors rating the show as Excellent/Good. Visitor numbers were just up on last year’s 4,310, but the quality of the attendees once again impressed countless exhibitors.
Top buyers
Renowned for attracting top buyers from across the food-to-go retailing and contract catering industry, the 2012 show’s aisles were packed with a “who’s who” of the sector – with 27% of buyers in attendance reporting a spending power of over £1million (15% of which reported over £5million). As a result, 90% of exhibitors have rated their quality of sales leads as Excellent/Good. And the waiting list for non-exhibitors looking to participate in lunch! 2013 already stands at over 130 companies.
Senior buyer Martin Hambleton, from leading contract caterers Elior UK, was just one of thousands of visitors who left the show with a host of new product ideas:
“Yet again lunch! has delivered above and beyond expectations and perhaps should rightly now carry the title of being the most up-to-date and industry specific source of innovation of any of the trade shows around.”
Keynotes and market trends
Renowned for its exceptional show content, it wasn’t just the show floor that was buzzing at lunch!. The show’s highly anticipated Keynotes were all well attended, with many – including sessions hosted by Pret A manager’s Director of Food Caroline Cromer and British Street Food Award founder Richard Johnson – enjoying standing room only crowds.
Also popular were lunch!’s two highly-anticipated market trend seminars. The first, hosted by Emma Read, director of marketing and business development with foodservice analyst Horizons, predicted that the UK lunch market, already “worth £14.9bn”, was set to expand over the next 12 months to occupy a growing share of overall foodservice sales.
Speaking at the show, Read said: “Britain’s lunch market is worth £14.9bn, that’s 35% of the total foodservice market. Growth over the past few years has outperformed what is essentially a flat market overall. Lunch business has risen by 3.3% on 2009 figures. We expect this growth to continue and expect the lunch market to account for closer to 36% of the total foodservice sector by 2014.”
Whilst Sodexo’s Lunch at Work Report, which was launched at the show on 21 September in conjunction with Allegra Strategies, revealed that taste, good value, convenience, and healthy food were the most important considerations for British workers.
British Smoothie Championships 2012
The live British Smoothie Championships 2012, sponsored by Magrini, was won by Jamal Houssien, MD and founder of Shake My Shake Ltd, with his delicious smoothie Tropical Rainforest: a combination of fresh tropical juice, mango fruit, coconut, banana, and mango frozen yogurt, topped off with coconut flakes. Aside from winning a wealth of industry kudos, Houssien took away the prize of a Vitamix Quiet One Blender worth over £1200.
“We just started to supply our smoothies to gyms and cafes around London, so winning this award has already started to make a major impact by helping us to secure more deals much more easily than ever before. We really are delighted,” says Jamal Houssien, the new British Smoothie Champion. “It just shows that when you have a great product the size of your organisation really doesn’t matter!”
lunch! Innovation Challenge Live!
Competition also remained at the fore of this year’s lunch! Innovation Challenge Live!. Designed to promote and celebrate genuinely new ideas in the market place, including brand innovations and new twists on established concepts, the Innovation Challenge attracted over 50 entrants this year. The 17 short-listed finalists were invited to pitch their innovative ideas to a panel of industry judges (which included Jodi Steer – food technologist for food-to-go, Marks and Spencer; John Harrison – chairman of The Good Eating Company; and Simon Ambrose – editor of Sandwich & Snack News).
This year’s lunch! Innovation Challenge Gold award winners included Eltoni Pasta’s quick-serve pasta concept called Good Pots, which uses a new patented system to take pasta from frozen to hot and perfectly al-dente in only 10 seconds; enabling retailers to produce up to 200 high-quality meals an hour.
Delice de France was another worthy Innovation Challenge winner, with its new Chocolation White Croissant. A straight butter croissant with delicious white chocolate inside, it is the industry’s first-ever white chocolate croissant.
Dawson Foodservice Equipment also picked up a gold award for innovation for the second year running for its new Lainox Heart Green Eco Combination Oven. Features include EcoSpeed and EcoVapour (enabling increased efficiency through a reduction in water and energy consumption) and Green Fine Tuning (GFT) – a new modulating burner system and (patented) high efficiency heat exchanger, which ensures power wastage and emissions are considerably reduced.
lunch! returns next year on 26-27 September 2013.
For more information click here