What an adventure into fresh produce land! Heather and I recently returned from the annual Produce Marketing Association's International Fresh Summit in Orlando, Florida. This annual show is the largest domestic trade show for the fresh produce industry. While sampling a hoard of yummy freshness, we capitalized on great opportunities to learn from some of the leaders in the produce industry. We also spent time visiting our clients at the show. Taylor Farms, Dulcinea and Garden Highway were all well represented with extraordinary booths.
It was rewarding to see the great booth that we helped to develop for Garden Highway. The Garden Highway crew did an incredible job of building an awesome booth that included a full-size sailboat with watermelon sails that we provided. Their booth grabbed a lot of interest including a visit from the world-famous Illiana watermelon queen. Garden Highway also made quite a splash with their successful launch of a complete redesign of their product line, labeling system and identity update. This update consumed a lot of Page sweat over the last 5 months and it was rewarding to experience the positive feedback from their customers first hand. Congrats to everyone involved. It is nice to work with fun people.
The produce industry is filled with passionate individuals and we are very proud to play a small role in bringing their products to market. One of the most rewarding parts of the PMA "Fresh Summit" was visiting with vendors and talking with them about their particular product. Whether they grew avocados, researched new environmentally friendly packaging solutions or had created a strain of bumble bees to help farmers with the current honey bee shortage, their passion and excitement was contagious. We walked away bursting with creative ideas for existing clients and can't wait to share what we learned with them.
We sat in on a lecture about effective brand storytelling that included Samatha Cabaluna from Earthbound Farms and Jan DeLyser from the California Avocado Commission. They showed great pride for their products and gave great insight into creating passion with consumers by telling effective stories through clear, concise marketing and design. Ms. DeLyser was nice enough to talk to us for a bit about the selection process they went through to find the right agency.
Some other highlights were the Wii sightings in many booths including the Dulcinea booth. Mexico took over the whole inside section of the floor with an entire mini village built of adobe ~ by far the largest in the show. There were many "celebrity" chefs combining many interesting fresh ingredients to make for a fascinating adventure for the taste buds. The most interesting of which could be either 1) fresh strawberries with mascarpone cheese and bacon, 2) the concentrated fig juice drizzled on cashews or 3) the cold salad of pomegranate, cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, cilantro and ?????. The Goji juice wasn't bad either…
Dole's booth and the Earthbound Farm's booths were rewarded with best of show but we tended to disagree and would like a recount (it was in Florida after all). Garden Highway was the undisputed winner according to our informal polls.
The show is in Anaheim next year so we are looking forward to less time on planes and more time learning, networking and visiting with our clients in the industry.
