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An Amazing Food Show in England
by Dave DeWitt
You know it’s going to be a fairly large food show when the main cooking demonstration area seats 3,000 people! In November, 1998, Mary Jane and I were in England visiting Pat and Dominique Chapman during the same weekend that he was doing a cooking demo at the BBC Good Food Show in Birmingham. When he asked if we would like to tag along, the answer was, of course, yes! How could we, as long-time show producers, miss the biggest food show in Europe?
This is the "national" food show of England because of Birmingham’s central location in the country, and the fact that people can drive to the show at the National Exhibition Centre, which has ten huge halls. The attendees park in distant car parks and are bused to the show. However, since we had show badges and Pat was a media star, we parked right behind the hall. Pat told me that the BBC Food Show that is held in London in March is only about half the size because of the difficulty in driving and parking at the hall in such a large city.
Pat’s demo was not in the large theatre--he had performed there the previous year. This year, he was sponsored by Safeway, the large supermarket chain, so he was demonstrating in their theatre, which seated about 125 people. It was packed, as Pat is the King of Curries in the U.K. and a very popular author and cooking authority. While a wine expert discussed what beers and wines went best with Indian food, Pat showed how to fold a samosa and fry it in hot oil. That was it! A single demo that lasted only a few minutes. He does very elaborate demos at the National Fiery Foods Show, so what was going on?
"Safeway wants to sell beer and wine," he told me. "I’m the window dressing."
"And how much do they pay you for this?" I asked in a nosy manner.
"An obscene amount," was all he would tell me.
There were many manufacturers of fiery foods exhibiting at the show, but of course most were involved in the Indian food industry, which has taken the country by storm over the past two decades. There are now more than eight thousand Indian food restaurants in the U.K. and, of course, Pat has his annual, 560-page guide to the best 1,000 of them, The 1999 Good Curry Guide. The industry has a trade publication, Tandoori Magazine, and a small, quarterly consumer publication that Pat edits, The Curry Club Magazine. Needless to say, there were hundreds of Indian food products at the show, and even Cobra Beer, an "Indian" beer that is brewed in the U.K.
I was more interested in the other hot and spicy products and how the British food lovers were responding to them. Our first stop was the HotHeadz display, where Stuart McAllister exhibited his imported American and Canadian products--dozens and dozens of them. His booth was mobbed by British chileheads eager to taste the newest imports. Since Stuart comes to the National Fiery Foods Show® to buy product, there were many familiar brands in his booth. Stuart told us that he is pursuing the chain stores, such as Safeway, Sainsbury’s, and Tesco to buy the fiery foods, and is having some success. "Price points are a problem," he told us, "So we’re emphasizing features and benefits of these imports rather than price. Shipping and duty costs are quite expensive, and that hurts widespread distribution." He said that the biggest fiery foods trend in the U.K. aside from Indian is Caribbean.
I asked him how much his booth rental was, and I was shocked by his reply: "About four times as much as yours." That meant he had paid the equivalent of $3029 for a booth that would cost $695-795 in the National Fiery Foods Show®.
"But this is a much larger show, five days long, with a huge attendance," I rationalized, wondering all the while if we were radically undercharging for our booths.
"More than 90,000 attendees in five days, but a consumer show only," Stuart said. "Only a few trade buyers and no time for them with this crowd."
But the timing for the show--a month before Christmas, couldn’t have been better. Most people were carrying bags of multiple purchases for presents, and a huge area in the hall was reserved for consumers checking their bags so that they could go back and do more shopping. One source told me that the average visitor not only pays the equivalent of $24 to attend the show, but spends $100 while there.
I did some quick calculations on my yellow pad. What is the economic impact of a show this size? Admission, about $2 million; booth sales, figuring on 300 plus exhibitors, about $1.3 million. And retail sales? An astonishing $9 million. Just a rough figure of $12.3 million total generated during a five-day show. Very impressive.
Stuart suggested some additional fiery foods manufacturers to visit, so we threaded our way through the dense crowd, got lost in the gigantic wine section, got distracted by all the candies, and finally located Delita Specialty Sauces. Attendees were crowded around the booth eagerly tasting twelve interesting sauces, including Spicy Barbecue, Red Chilli, Hot Pepper, Jalapeño, Habanero, and a number of Indian sauces like Pakora, Samosa & Bhaji, and Yoghurt & Mint. I spoke with Delita’s enthusiastic sales and promotion manager, Julie Curtis, who told me that the company was only a year-and-a-half old. "Sauces--especially hot sauces--are the food of the future in the U.K.," she said. "And we make certain that our sauces are tasty and spicy rather than superhot." Their best-seller is Hot Chilli with Garlic Sauce, which is slightly sweet. They prefer to sell to the "multiples," as chain stores are called in the U.K.
The next stop was the Fifth Sense Trading Company booth. They were too busy for conversation, so I picked up a brochure and discovered that they were the U.K. distributor of Trader Joe’s, the California-based specialty food chain. That means that Fifth Sense carries a great line of fiery foods, including Huy Fong’s Sriracha sauce, Ass Kickin’ Fajita Marinade, Three Bandito’s salsas, Trader Jose’s Salsa Verde, as well as chile oils and other exotic sauces.
Another major player in the British fiery foods area is Discovery Foods, a nine-year-old company specializing in Mexican and regional American foods. They had a fine selection of products and were obviously in competition with Old El Paso for the salsa and enchilada market. They supply restaurants as well as supermarkets. A representative of the company, Bob Tinsley, told me that the increasing interest in fiery foods is because the British people are more educated about food and more adventurous than ever before. Many have traveled to the U.S. and are more open to trying American products.
I was beginning to see a pattern emerging. Fiery foods are developing in the U.K. precisely as they did in the U.S. Of course, the U.K. had no native pockets of heat like Louisiana and the American Southwest. But after the curry boom, people began to acquire a taste for hot and spicy, heavily seasoned foods of all kinds. This parallels the popularity of Mexican food in the U.S. when Americans broke free of the meat and potatoes habit and began to gobble down chimichangas in Boston. I saw dozens of fiery food products and all the hot sauces anyone could want in an upscale country market/deli near Haslemere in southwest England, where Pat and Dominique live. So I have no doubt that the U.K. will be a huge market for fiery foods from everywhere.
It was evident from the BBC Good Food Show that the English now worship food. They will pay the equivalent of $24 a person for the privilege of tasting and buying food--plus wine, cookbooks, and kitchen accessories--from all over the world. Their TV cooking stars--and there are lots of them--are media celebrities akin to Martha Stewart or Julia Child in the U.S. but in a rock star sort of way. They are mobbed at appearances, sell huge numbers of cookbooks, are written about in the tabloids, and can draw tens of thousands of people to cooking demos.
A recent fax from Pat informs us that the show scene in England is heating up even more. The second annual Ethnic Food Show will be in a larger hall; the BBC Good Food Show in London is adding a Rice and Spice Cooking Theatre, which Pat will host; and Hot ’n Spicy, a consumer show devoted to fiery foods, will come to Wembley Exhibition Centre in West London in October, 1999.
If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that the Brits are copying us! But in some ways, they’re way ahead of us.
BBC Good Food Show Facts
Dates: Wednesday, November 25-Sunday, November 29, 1998
Venue: National Exhibition Centre, Birmingham, England
Show Hall Size: Approximately 200,000 square feet
Number of Exhibitors: 300+
Cooking Demo Areas: Safeway Theatre, Tesco Theatre, Fresh ‘n’ Healthy Theatre, Good Food Celebrity Theatre, Country Cookery Theatre, Carlton Food Network Theatre
Admission: £14.50 ($24.00), includes one admission to Celebrity Theatre
Attendance: 90-95,000 in 5 days
Booth Cost: Space Only: £184 per square meter (equals $2732 for a ten by ten foot booth)
Shell Scheme (with paneling instead of draping): £204 per square meter (equals $3029 for a ten by ten foot booth). Water and waste disposal extra.
Show Producer: Consumer Exhibitions, Ltd., 011-44-181-948-1666
Spicy Snacks in London
by Dave DeWitt
We requested some hot sauce in the restaurant at the Marlborough House on Cromwell Road to spice up Mary Jane’s rather boring crab cakes, but regretfully, they had none. So we requested any kind of hot chile (chilli, there), and amazingly enough, they brought us fresh cayennes imported from Holland (greenhouse-grown) that were hot and quite tasty. At the posh Harvey Nichols Food Court, we found ristras and fresh cayennes, as well as a great selection of worldwide hot sauces. While at the Rat & Parrot pub on Gloucester Street, I had my usual craving for something spicier than fish and chips. Did I dare to order the "Chilli--Texas-Style" that was on the menu? Of course, I dared. Visually, it resembled a bowl of red served in Austin, except that I was in a London pub, the Rolling Stones were blaring out of the speakers, and I was drinking a draught Bemish Stout. This chili was supposedly from Texas, but it contained beans--kidney beans to be exact. People reading this in the Lone Star State now have tears in their eyes from laughing so hard, but the dish wasn’t bad. Call it kidney beans and beef in a spicy chilli-tomato sauce, then. Anyway, it had enough fire in it, and this renamed "Chilli-London-Style" worked well with the stout on a rainy and chilly fall day.