Hotel, Restaurant and Catering Show 2024

Last week saw the Hotel, Restaurant and Catering Show 2024. This is a must-go to show for anyone in UK hospitality and catering businesses. It’s held every year as part of the Food, Drink and Hospitality Week. It’s 5 linked shows attract over 1,500 exhibitors and 27,000 visitors.

The timing this year in the week before Easter was not ideal for some. Particularly if you’re in an area like Gloucestershire, where that was the first week of the school holidays. If the clash prevented you from going here are some highlights.

Sampling the Rational Experience

As usual Rational had a large stand. Here visitors could explore and engage with Rational experts on innovative, intelligent cooking systems, such as the iVario advanced bratt pan and the iCombi Pro combi-steamer. Or they could take part in the Arena Show. This is an exclusive 12-seater arena for an intimate experience, where members of the trade can witness the artistry of Rational cooking, showcasing the powerful performance of Rational cooking systems, and to sample the plated dishes.

Throughout the show there was a fantastic line-up of Rational chefs and special guests including:

• Simon Rogan MBE, Rational Ambassador and Chef/Owner L’Enclume
• Tom Barnes, Rational Ambassador and Executive Chef of Umbel Restaurant Group
• Keziah Whittaker, Young MasterChef Winner 2023
• Rehan Uddin, Rational Ambassador and Head Chef Owner of Indi Yang
• Holly Charnock, Rational Ambassador and Head Chef at Woodlands Primary School

The Pub Show

Our focus this year was the Pub Show. Here the British Institute of Inn-Keeping launched its brand-new free-to-use membership platform called Workforce. This is a great source of information on professional development, apprenticeships and training information for anyone in the pub trade. It’s particularly useful for the independent pub owners, who make up the majority of its 13,000 members.

To be honest we were drawn there by the first launch of a new drinks category for training by the Wine and Spirit Education Trust in 10 years. It launched its Level 1 and 2 Awards in Beer. Here the focus is on training through tasting to become beer confident through product knowledge and developed tasting skills. The beer market is changing surprisingly quickly especially amongst microbrewers. Pre-covid the focus was on heavy alcoholic stouts and sour beers; now the trends are towards simplified pale lagers and pale ales as the experience, not the drink, becomes the focus of the night out.

Among the product highlights was Clear Brew, a beer-line cleaning using water-fed mixing unit requiring no electricity or propellant gas; and Love Corn whose corn kernels are bang on trend being vegan, gluten-free, low sugar and high fibre!

Work-Life Balance

The main show hosted Planday whose report The Shift Towards Retention was created in collaboration with the Burnt Chef Project. This urges a move away from last minute rotas and towards conscious scheduling, even shift plans 22 days ahead. The main driver is improved mental health for the sector.

Almost two thirds of hospitality businesses suffer from staff shortages currently. 40% as result have had to reduce opening hours. The main new workforce is Gen Z. Gen Z focuses on well-being as a main career goal. This conflicts with the traditional view of the sector as being low pay, unstable and unsure hours and unclear career progression. The industry has no option but to change.

Catering Industry Talking and Knowledge

As ever there was a packed three-day programme of talks around anything to do with the business including:

• Future of Foodservice, a 2030 vision
• Making Sense of the National Living Wage Rise
• Future of African and Caribbean Cuisine and Culture
• Looking after Our Teams: the Importance of Physical Health
• Hospitality Marketing Trends to Watch; and
• Kan UK’s largest Hospitality Salary Survey results

While the talks have gone, some essential knowledge is still available by going to the IGD reports page. Here you can download a whole series of reports and forecasts on UK markets and sectors from the five 2024 eating out market trends, through retail technology trends to food & drink and food to go market forecasts. The latter demonstrate the difficult markets we all face currently. Food-to-go will grow by 6.2% in the current year, but this is only inflation with real growth in 2025; food and drink is more steady and overall by 2028 will grow by a fifth in value.

Visit in 2025

At this point, we realise we’ve not yet talked about all the product launches at the various shows and the other innovations. But that is the beauty of this event pulling all the different sectors of our business together to share.

You may have missed the Hotel, Restaurant and Catering Show 2024 but next year’s shows are 17-19th March. So put them in your diary now to gain inspiration for many different aspects of your business

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