The National Confectioners Association (NCA) once again saw record attendance at its Sweets & Snacks Expo, held May 24-26 at McCormick Place in Chicago. According to the organization, the Expo drew in more than 17,000 industry professionals from more than 90 countries. The expo hosted more than 750 companies exhibiting their products across nearly four acres of space.
To make room for so many exhibitors, the show floor expanded this year into a second hall, the new Skyline Hall. Susan Whiteside, VP of public relations for NCA, spoke to The Shelby Report’s Geoff Welch at the show about this year’s boost in attendees.
“We had a couple hundred people on waiting lists for a few years,” she said. “So we gave it a lot of thought and did a survey, and we decided that we would explore looking into this ballroom on the other side of our show, still here in the West building. And, when we went out to some of the people on the waiting list, response was overwhelming. We managed to sell all of that space, which meant that we had an increase in booth spaces of about 22 percent.”
More than 200 of this year’s exhibitors were new to the show, Whiteside said, which is about double the usual number of new exhibitors.
To make sure that there was plenty of traffic to Skyline Hall, which regular attendees weren’t used to visiting, NCA rearranged this year’s show floor and replaced its usual morning keynote speakers with a multi-track education program, with various sessions taking place throughout the building.
“We have education sessions that are really focused on snacks and snack buyers, trends overall, on confectionery, on merchandising, so you can kind of pick and choose what works best for you instead of one size fits all,” she added.
Hershey honored with Best in Show during NCA’s Innovative New Products Awards
The Hershey Co. again won the event’s Best in Show award. The company won two years ago for its York Minis, said Whiteside, and this year, it stole the show with its new Reese’s Stuffed with Pieces candy.
“The Monday before the show, a group of experts in the industry, they get together and they taste all of the products that are submitted as potential products for most innovative of the year. This year, we got 320 entries,” Whiteside said.
Award winners and nominees are named in each of nine competition categories, which are chocolate, non-chocolate, sweet snacks, salty snacks, savory snacks, novelty/licensed, seasonal, gourmet/premium, and gum and mints. The overall winner among all the categories is named Best in Show.
