Fitting the space with natural cardboard for the Global Seeds&Chips Summit

An environmentally friendly exhibition stand is an achievement for those who value the theme, but setting up an entire pavilion for an event as important as the Global Food Innovation Summit was a real challenge.

Seeds&Chips The Global Food Innovation Summit is one of the world’s leading food innovation events, offering a prestigious stage on which major players meet each year to address important topics such as the increase in world population and food consumption, climate change, scarcity of available resources, socio-demographic changes, health protection and irreversible changes in purchasing choices. We are changing the way food is produced, processed, distributed, communicated and consumed. And we are on course to face urgent challenges like never before in human history, and the technological infrastructure seems to be one of the possible ways to tackle it.

An ambitious and sustainable project

It was an ambitious and sustainable project, not so much in the process of shaping the space on paper, but in thinking of an ecological exhibition design that could enhance the theme of the meeting without stealing the show. In short, to create a setting that remained as natural as possible and was also able to tie in with the theme of innovation, giving it the right value.

We started by dividing the available hall space into areas to be filled and from there we ideally arranged the various stands from the largest to the smallest, creating harmonious and wide-ranging paths. We decided to use cardboard tubes left in their original havana colour to construct the stands by sectioning them in different heights and assembling them in vertical and horizontal sections to create movement and a natural decoration of the walls. The larger stands were designed as wide-meshed cages whose tubes were held together by frames at the top. Each box was equipped with a reception console also made of tubes joined vertically and fitted with a natural triple-wave cardboard top covered with a thinner blue-printed cardboard sheet that descended to cover part of the structure. Display panels also printed in bright blue with the exhibitor’s name and country of origin completed the set-up. In addition to the individual boxes, the ecological trade fair set-up included areas in which laminated walls in reciprocal solution always made of cardboard tubes on which individual display panels were hung to divide the individual stations. A console desk was positioned in front of each of the individual stations to welcome visitors. The set-up also included smaller individual stations on the same theme positioned in a circle around the pavilion pillars. Filling the space were display panels with photo prints, ecological furniture elements and displays made for the occasion.