Last week, head honcho Ian headed into London for the quintessential exhibition for the UK catering industry: Hotelympia. Hosted by ExCel overlooking the London Docklands, Hotelympia has become a monster of an event featuring exhibitors, seminars, demonstrations and competitions.
From highly lauded chefs wandering around with clipboards as they marked competition entries to phenomenal displays of cutting edge technologies, this exhibition covers every element of the hospitality industry. Whether looking for back of house catering equipment to make your kitchen indescribably high-tech or seeking out marketing and PR tips from a panel of media-savvy hospitality consultants, Hotelympia aims to be all things to all caterers.
We were primarily on the look out for new crockery to add to our fine range of tableware. The ‘New Wave’ line of dishes from Villeroy and Boch with their funky shapes certainly drew a lot of attention, proving to be both incredibly stylish and durable for sustained use.
At Jacaranda, we pride ourselves on not only creating breathtaking food, but also presenting it in a memorable manner, so for us a lot of thought goes into how your meal will look as well as taste.
In addition to sourcing some fantastic new presentation products, we were also keen to see what else is new within the industry. The seminars hosted by ‘Hospa’ provide technological advice for everyone from those without a clue what Twitter is to those with a firm social media strategy in place.
With the average working week within the catering industry totalling around 80 hours, it can sometimes be hard to give precedence to creating an online presence, but these informative discussions provided key tips and tricks to enable all of us to communicate more wildly and stop burying our heads in the sand.
Hotelympia was, as always, inspirational and gave us many things to think about over the coming year. Hopefully some of our clients throughout the summer will begin to see examples of the bits and pieces we picked up whilst at the show!