By Jonathan Hilder, CEO, AVA
In a world where shows get smaller and people book later, Vending Paris 2014 was a ‘must see’, because this year, the organisers decided to merge a number of shows into one, namely: Vending Paris, Sandwich and Snack and Parizza
Vending Paris used to be the home of espresso coffee and small machines, consisting of a number of European manufacturers and a smattering of UK exhibitors. It was a good place to meet colleagues and be kept up to date on European ‘need to knows’, such as Sugar Taxes (in France), vending machines as cash registers (in Germany) and the Euro-wide healthy lobby.
This year though, it changed and vending took a definite step backwards; it was not the centre of the show. Food was the main point of it and visitors had come to see developments in fresh food. From a UK perspective this is not nearly as interesting to us as it is, say, to Germans; where sandwiches make up 30% of snack machine vends. Vending took up about 30% of the exhibition space and the majority of the visitors I saw were in the food area – although the whole exhibition was busy. My hope is that the visitors will come and look at the vending market to see what we can offer and that consequently new converts may be made.
To help the visitors understand the differences in 4 of the larger vending markets, presentations were given by the following the National Associations of the U.K., France, Germany and Russia.
AVA members can find all these presentations on the members’ only area of the website. They do make an interesting read: If you’ve forgotten your username or password please contact Annabelle at an*******@************co.uk.
Overall, Paris was an interesting link up by Reid exhibitions, who put snack and vending together: but time will tell if this will work. longterm I believe that this format is far more relevant to our continental colleagues han it is to us, as their markets are very different to ours. The French “Feel Good” machines (around 1500 of them) have now sold some 162,000 apples. Not sure that we have quite got there over here…
