Casual Dining – one of the year’s most hotly-anticipated trade event launches – proved a big hit with buyers last week. The two day show, which opened at the Business Design Centre in London on 26-27 February, attracted 3,655 attendees (excluding revisits) from across the casual dining sector.
Combining a bustling central trade exhibition with a packed programme of standing-room only Keynotes, Casual Dining delivered on its promise to be the dedicated event that this dynamic sector had been waiting for. Offering established and new casual dining operators the opportunity to meet up with existing and potential suppliers, to network, discover new products, and keep up with changing market trends, Casual Dining was hailed as a significant and overwhelming success by its organiser, Diversified Communications UK. More importantly, feedback from across the show floor has been full of praise for the launch.
Busy, vibrant, relevant, innovative, excellent, and essential – are just some of the words attendees have used to describe the 2014 show so far; with one visiting Orkney hotelier commenting that it was “well worth the 1,500 mile round trip”.
Louise Direito, from the pipeline innovation team at YUM Restaurants International, was another satisfied attendee. “Casual Dining is an excellent show. It is great to have an event that finally brings the industry together,” she says.
“Casual Dining was packed full of quality seminars with excellent speakers and great suppliers,” agrees Paul Pavli, operations director at Punch Taverns. “It’s a trade show that I’m sure will become a must do every year.”
More than 1,300 independent outlets were also represented; of those, around a fifth (21%) cited a corporate spend in excess of £500,000.
Restaurants, pubs and bars, and wholesalers and distributers were by far the show’s biggest audience (31%, 23% and 15% respectively), followed by contract caterers at 12% and hotels at 9%.
The high turnout at the show (both in terms of quality and quantity of visitors) reflects the growing popularity of casual dining within the hospitality industry. Having doubled in size in just over a decade, the casual dining market is now worth £7bn, according to Peter Backman, managing director of the insights firm Horizons (host of the show’s opening Keynote). For many, the launch of the show itself was a clear sign that casual dining was thriving and gaining in both recognition – and sales.
“Big thanks really must go to all our exhibitors and partners who have supported the launch of Casual Dining right from the start,” says group event manager Chris Brazier. “We knew that expectations were going to be high – particularly because there’s been nothing quite like it before. But the way it has been so positively received – by thousands of suppliers and operators, from right across the UK – has been truly amazing.
We now have an exceptional foundation from which to grow and develop over the coming years. I’m looking forward to Casual Dining 2015 already!” he says.