Gifts & Greetings Review was delighted to attend the press launch for Ambiente 2020, the world’s largest consumer goods exhibition, which will be held at the Messe Frankfurt centre from February 7-11.
In the fabulous setting of Nobu Shoreditch in London, Ambiente’s Director for Living and Giving, Yvonne Engelmann, talked us through plans for the forthcoming show, which welcomed 136,081 visitors from 167 countries to Messe Frankfurt at this year’s edition.
The show is renowned for it’s spectacular presentation of tableware and kitchen products, a sector that will be further developed for 2020 with a dedicated HoReCa zone. The local and international hotel, restaurant and catering trade is a massively growing market right now, compared with the declining retail sector. Ambiente has been onto this important macro trend since 2012, when HoReCa businesses began visiting the show en masse in search of new product solutions. Around 25% of all Ambiente visitors are interested in this sector.
The new HoReCa zone will occupy Hall 6.0 and is expected to be the central focal point of Ambiente for the next few years, primarily serving the front of house business for cafes, bars, hotels, restaurants and other catering businesses. Around 100 companies will exhibit in this zone in 2020 and a dedicated speaker programme will ensure visitors are kept informed of important trends and other information relevant to their market. Amongst the 25 keynote speakers, London-based kitchen and dining legend, Jozef Youssef, will present a sector trend report commissioned by Ambiente on Saturday February 8.
A number of Awards will be held to celebrate all things related to kitchen and tableware, including Dineus, German Design Award, Kitchen Innovation Award, the Tableware International Award of Excellence and Plagiarius (this latter being the booby prize for non-originality!).
Elsewhere at the show the Ethical Style Guide will prove indispensable to the growing number of retailers who are keen to keep on top of sustainable initiatives. Every exhibitor in the guide will have their eco-friendly, organic and fair trade credentials independently verified, and they can be identified with relevant labelling on the show floor.
Messe Frankfurt will once again support blossoming designers through its Talents programme, which in 2020 will focus on young interior design and contemporary tableware businesses, with feature areas in Halls 8:0 and 4:0.
Following eight large-scale partner country presentations over the past few years, Ambiente is taking a change of direction in 2020 with a Focus on Design that will kick off in style with beautiful Brazil. Yvonne explained that this is a “very young but fast growing design nation with a very mixed population, which produces very modernistic design with strong folkloric traditional craft elements.” A number of exceptional young designers from Brazil will feature in the Talents programme, including: Bianca Barbato (pictured above), Brunno Jahara, Rodrigo Almeida (pictured bottom), RAIN (Marianna Ramos & Ricardo Inneco) and Sergio J. Matos (pictured left).
Yvonne announced another very exciting new development for the show during the press launch which reflects the enormous and ever-growing influence of the Internet on the local and international retail trade.
First of these online initiatives is Conzoom Solutions, a new online platform for consumer goods retailers. There will be four sectors within this online marketplace, incorporating Trade Fairs, Insights, Learning and Point of Sale, also constituting an employment exchange for employees, employers, agents and trade reps.
The second initiative in this area is Nextrade, which Ambiente is positioning as THE worldwide online B2B marketplace in Home & Living. Messe Frankfurt is working together with nmedia and EK/Servicegroup to deliver the platform, which is designed to benefit the entire industry and enable retailers to place orders with suppliers 365 days a year. The platform will launch with 500 Ambiente exhibitors, rolling out to 2000 companies over the next two years and with a view to opening it out to all suppliers, whether or not they participate in Messe Frankfurt exhibitions.
For more information on the show and to register visit the website.
