[T]he HOST Exhibition is one of those events that causes people to misuse the word enormity. The café, restaurant, and hotel hospitality trade show is housed in fourteen hangar-sized buildings in the Fiera Milano, an event space a kilometer long by nearly a kilometer wide. More than 2,000 exhibitors from four dozen countries will fill the buildings, and they’ll be visited by more than 135,000 people.
Something this big would cause an uncareful writer to pen a line like, “The enormity of HOST is hard to overstate,” or, “HOST’s enormity is only matched by the quality of products on display.” While the sentiment is correct, enormity has the misfortune of meaning “a shocking, evil, or immoral act”—clearly not the intended meaning. The closest thing to enormity HOST could pull off is inducing an unsuspecting attendee to walk the whole thing in one day while wearing a bad pair of shoes. But the responsibility for that would really fall on the attendee for being a cheapskate and only springing for a one-day entry badge.
Enormousness is often cited as the intended word (enormity seems like the noun form of enormous), but let all the journalist headed to HOST this week know: immensity is the word they want. The immensity of HOST is, truly, hard to overstate. The SCAA Event, a show that’s been known to gobsmack first-timers with alarming regularity, has about 400 exhibitors and 12,000 attendees. That makes HOST five times the size of SCAA in exhibitors and eleven times bigger in attendance. (In fairness, this is a comparison of a single-industry apple to an all-of-hospitality basket of oranges.)
Coffee, tea, and café companies are sure to exhibit a wave of new products. Among the most exciting is Mahlkönig’s presentation of a prototype of a next-generation EK-43. Keep an eye on Fresh Cup’s Twitter and Instagram accounts to see the latest and coolest from the biggest trade show around.
