Last week we worked alongside the City of Melbourne for one of our biggest shows of the year: ATE15. ATE (the Australian Tourism expo) is an annual national summit that brings together buyers and sellers from the tourism industry Australia wide.
Imagine six exhibition halls inside of the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre divided into a combination of booths for speed dating (more on this later) and gorgeous trade stands (one from each state and territory with amazing food and beverage offerings).
It's an opportunity for hoteliers, venues, tour groups, and representatives of experiential destinations and cities to show off their "stuff" to global buyers of the tourism industry. Put simply, it's every place and thing you can go and visit in Australia, put on show in the one place. It's big, it's loud, it's busy, and it’s big budget.
Back to the speed dating. Set over four days, "buyers" have short appointments (less than 20 minutes) with "sellers" that run back-to-back. Relationships are kindled and Australian experiences are brokered for the year ahead. There's a tight schedule, enforced by a P.A and chime system that drives buyers to move, shuffle and shake.
Fuelling these speedy relationships at the core is of course coffee, just like at most trade shows. In particular, Melbourne was on show with the City of Melbourne having its trade stand front-and-centre as delegates entered the show. And of course Melbourne, having the reputation that it, does had high expectations to deliver that "Melbourne style" of coffee that it's so famous for globally. Together with the City of Melbourne we helped deliver a Pop-Up Cafe experience to showcase Melbourne's best coffee.
What made this show really interesting for us was the diversification of the offering that the city of Melbourne wanted us to showcase. Over the four days, we had the opportunity to showcase four of Melbourne's top coffee roasters; St Ali, Seven Seeds, Industry Beans, and Market Lane. This in itself was a challenge—but a really, really fun one. In Coffee On Cue’s last 18 months of operating, I'd worked with each of these roasters. But this was our first chance to dial in, extract and serve their coffee properly in a high-volume environment. Notably, with each new day a new food item was introduced, with each coffee roaster rotating as well. Bias aside, the Industry Beans "coffee garden" was my visual favourite, closely followed by the salted caramel peanut brittle by chef Donavon Cook of "The Atlantic Crown ".
From the perspective of a barista, it was enjoyable to watch the reaction of the delegates (buyers and sellers alike) when they were tasting their "usual coffee" that had a different flavour profile from the day previous. That said, some didn't bat an eyelash: maybe they kept coming back for the big stand and the bright lights, but I like to think it was to visit their favourite barista at the show.
Over the course of the four days we served enough cups to serve the entire delegate crowd one and a half times over. Like I said before, it was big...
Next year the show travels to the Gold Coast from May 15-19th, with the Gold Coast then taking main stage. It was an absolute honour to be partnered alongside the City of Melbourne. We look forward to doing it all over again next year.