I’ve spent the past two and a half years attending trade fairs dedicated to home interiors and accessories. This year though, I attended my first food fair: CIBUS, a biennial fair dedicated to Italian food. I will go to my second, Salone del Gusto (Slow Food) in late October.

Design trade fairs are often feasts for the eyes. Food fairs are, not surprisingly, feasts for the palate. Nothing ugly will sneak up on you in a design fair. Culinary adventurism can deliver lingering un-pleasantries. Like design fairs,
everything you see is not appetizing at food fairs, despite the fantastic imagery the name “Fair of Italian Food” might conjure up…However, in both cases, aesthetics obviously plays a key role.

After attending so many design fairs, I have my own system and my brain goes into Terminator mode (not the terminating part but the scanning of everything in the ‘viewfinder’ part)— In a quick pan of the room, I pick up the necessary information, registering repetition, stand out items, great efforts, no effort, creativity, and so on. I don’t have my bearing for food fairs. So with the ‘settings’ of my design fair goggles, when I entered the Parma fair pavilion, I started to take a few mental notes.   For example: In sharp contrast with design fairs, where the majority of the visitors are women, at CIBUS, 90% of the attendees were men. My best guess as to why is based on the composition of the sector and the Italian
cultural reality: Women, most likely, either own and/or are responsible for buying items for interior shops or any client with material aesthetic need. Men, on the other hand, do the commercial negotiating, represent the consortia of producers, and manage the small and medium sized (often family run) enterprises which make up a large portion of the fair. The women attendees at the design fairs—where the 4-inch stiletto reigns supreme—are built for speed. The women at CIBUS, who seemed to be there with the kind permission of their husbands, were built for comfort. Shod in Tod’s or Hogan’s, carrying an obligatory Louis Vuitton boule. No joke, no exceptions. And they all stuck together. If you watch Sex and the City, the most apt comparison between the two is Carrie vs Charlotte.

The biggest difference though was how easy (or not) it was to make sense of it all. A designer can vary pattern, texture, form, color, materials, use—the trends and changes, at least for me, and with practice, are identifiable. In a food fair—an Italian food fair to be precise—where traditional, authentic, pure [quality], and ‘reliable’ are the four most important concepts a consumer buys into when choosing their food, where are the trends?

It’s hard to write this never having been to any other food fair in any other country, but I imagine that it is probably fair to say that for the most part in this market, the trends do not translate into flavors on the consumers’ palates. Those companies with the capacity to innovate flavors and produce new products yearly are the giants, not, for obvious reasons, the small and medium sized producers which have earned Italian food and primary ingredients a ‘cult following’. So to write about the trends of the fair would be rather boring, unless you care about packaging over long haul (logistics), emerging markets (where and to whom to focus sales efforts), and services (point of sale), to name a few. In a design
fair, you might find the next big name or iconic piece of something. At an Italian food fair, you really don’t want to find the next big whatever because it means a break from the tried and true, and we all know that there is no improving on parmigiano reggiano, aceto balsamico, prosciutto di parma, mozzarella di bufala, olio extra vergine di oliva, pecorino sardo, romano, or toscano, gorgonzola, and so forth and so on… But really there won’t be the next big anything anyway because Italian tastes are pretty conservative as far as trying new things go…and that kind of limits what you put out there.

So, when I leave a design fair, I think of aesthetics and how I’m going to paint my living room or decorate my bedroom. When I walked around CIBUS, I thought of what my graduate school International Economics professor referred to as dollar bills on the sidewalk. He asked metaphorically, when speaking of arbitration, “Why are there no dollar bills on the sidewalk? Because somebody always picks them up.” Until CIBUS, you could always hear me say that in real estate there are always dollar bills on the sidewalk. Now, please add to it the Italian food sector. So, of course, I will do a round up of my favorite products from the Fair, but first, I’d like to talk about the dollar bills in the Italian food sector. When I left the food fair, I left thinking of niche business opportunities and ways to expand sales. Generally speaking, this is what I would have said had I been asked…

Guys, when it comes to food, forget Field of Dreams. If you build it, they will not come. I never understood exactly the why behind the statistics put forth by BuonItalia, government entity whose goal is to increase Italy’s 6%
share of the world agro-alimentary market, because I thought the world was gaga for everything “Made in Italy” especially if it was “Made in Nonna’s Kitchen”. But it boils down to the marketing. You have a great cheese. Tell
somebody about it. Anybody. Not just your neighbor and your family. Tell the mayor. Drive to the next town and tell them. Take it with you on your next trip. Just don’t keep it a secret (and then complain that the market is in shambles and your sales are depressed).

Do not take the money and run. You have your crummy little stand in the biggest busiest pavilion with the hardest heaviest hitters and the best products, people with real marketing budgets (who, we have seen, don’t know how to use them). You have no work space in the stand to take orders and for some reason that doesn’t bother you. Your brochures are photocopies of practically handwritten information that hasn’t been updated in 17 years. I get it. You’re a heavily subsidized caper producer and someone else paid for your fair attendance. Your print collateral says you’ve got the best capers on earth, but the presentation is so crappy and you only care about seeing the people you know that I’ve lost all
desire to find out more about your product. You are getting tax payers money to promote a food product which is typical of your region. Stand up and act like you care and make a good showing.

People always judge a book by its cover. See that cute little cookie package tied with red string that reminds you of when you were a kid? See that ugly gold hot foil trim with nauseating color combinations you’ve chosen for your packaging
because your brother-in-law’s nephew claims to be a graphic designer and gave you a good price? Guess which one I’m going to want to know more about and want to try? Under this heading also falls complete information on your business card.

You can be ugly or you can be mean, but you can’t be both. Translated into food fairspeak, if the people on your stand are rude and/or blowing off potential buyers or press, you better pray to high heaven that you’ve got so much of the market nobody can shake you, or that your product is so good that I’m willing to put up with the crap to have it. But if I don’t know your product, how will I know it’s so good it’s worth the ugliness? I won’t. Because I’ll keep going. (This
isn’t unique to food fairs, but in design fairs, it’s a bit harder to find a close substitute for something as unique as a chair designed by the Campana brothers… But you can find another producer of parmigiano reggiano…)

The more the merrier. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard an Italian say, ”I don’t need any new friends. I have all the friends I need.” I guess that’s ok for your little nights out at the pizzeria, but it’s not a good business strategy. This kind of goes hand in hand with the previous point about being ugly or mean but not both. If you have a great relationship with your existing portfolio of clients, that’s great. You probably won’t lose them. But if you’re in a fair, presumably it’s to make more orders. So instead of saying “excuse me” to the new client so you can go flap your gums with an existing client, it should be the other way around. Unless of course you don’t care about new orders, in which case you could have stopped reading a long time ago.

How can you call yourself serious if you don’t have a website? I don’t really need to explain this one, do I?? But I should also add, if your website was done by the same nephew who did the ugly gold hot foil packaging design from above, then don’t expect to get too many orders from the largest importing markets in the world. We all know who those are, and so do you.

Don’t get me wrong, I do have a minimal understanding of the challenges facing the small and medium-sized producer—and I won’t go into them here, but yes, I do understand. However, there is a lot a small (or even big) company can do with a very small financial investment to maximize their fair presence and consequently their presence in the market. I’ve  only listed the most common sense things.  For more information, please contact me.

So here are but a few winners from the Fair…

Biscottificio Antonio Mattei: Biscotti di Prato

Luigi Lazzaris & Figlio: Mostarda, Preserves, Spicy Sauces

Leonardi: Aceto Balsamico di Modena

La Vecchia Dispensa: Chocolates

Filotea: Artisan pasta- according to them they are the only ones who put regular flour in their product (the others use semola) from the Marches region

La Campanella Formaggi: Parmigiano Reggiano

Caseificio Principe: buffalo milk mozzarella

Verrigni: Artisan pasta from Abruzzo region

La Collina Toscana: Consortium of products from the Casentino region of Tuscany

Beppino Occelli: Goat’s Milk Cheeses

Toniolo: Cheeses from the Veneto region

Fattorie Garofalo: Buffalo milk mozzarella

Santagata since 1907: Olive Oil

Prunotto: preserves, honey, fruit products

Consortium for the protection of Pecorino Toscano: pecorino toscano producers

Caseificio Sociale di Valle Camonica e del Sebino: Cheeses from Brescia (Lombardy)

Benagiano Pastificio: artisan pasta from Puglia region

L’Antica Cascina: fresh and aged cheeses from Emilia Romagna

Consortium for the protection of Gorgonzola: gorgonzola cheese producers

Consortium for traditional cured meats from Piacenza: cured meat producers

Mario Costa: Gorgonzola