McCormick Place fills this weekend with the operators who actually decide what ends up on American plates: chain culinarians, independent chef owners, distributor category managers, and the procurement teams who quietly shape menus from Newark to San Diego. The National Restaurant Association Show is not a consumer event. It is the room where U.S. foodservice does its real buying.
We are there for two reasons, both pointing back to Rimini. First, to identify American buyers and importers who should be walking the halls of SIGEP next January, the global stage for gelato, pastry, coffee, and artisan bakery. Second, to invite serious U.S. brands, equipment makers, ingredient houses, and emerging concepts, to exhibit at SIGEP themselves, where European distribution is built in four days.
The logic is simple. American foodservice is hungry for credible Italian product, but the path from a Bologna producer to a Chicago kitchen is rarely linear. It runs through a buyer who understands both ends, a distributor with the right cold chain, and a trade show where trust is established face to face. SIGEP is that show on the European side. The National Restaurant Association Show is the mirror on this one.
For European producers, the takeaway is operational, not aspirational. The U.S. market does not reward the brand that shows up once. It rewards the one that shows up twice in the same conversation: in Chicago in May, in Rimini in January, with the same buyer in the room both times. That is how a pilot order becomes a national program.
If you are exhibiting in Chicago this week, or you are a U.S. operator curious about what European pastry, gelato, and bakery innovation actually looks like at scale, find us on the floor. Quiet introductions, no pitch deck.
“American foodservice does not reward the brand that shows up once. It rewards the one that shows up twice in the same conversation.”
