Playground

The word playground can have many meanings and connotations. This September the theme of our Business Days conference will be exactly this, the playground. Every year we have a different theme, and it is always something that describes the previous twelve months, the current situation and the year to come for our trade very well. There are always interesting parallels and you also need to read between the lines.

This topic will be something like this once again. Unfortunately after the last two years our trade is facing several challenges again, but this time this is also true for the government. In the last two years many market players had the feeling that they were going down the slide, while others were forced to sit on the swing – which never takes you forward, because it just goes up and down – and of course there are those who are in a good position and try to knock off the pieces of competitors from the board, then there are those who have been going up and down the seesaw for quite a while, and more and more market players are struggling on the climbing frames, not to mention the sandbox…

You will get to read the conference’s programme in the next issue of our magazine, but you can already know that the best experts from every field will gather between 19 and 23 September, in Hunguest Hotel Pelion in Tapolca. The conference announcement and the early bird offer, which is valid until 31 May, can already be found at businessdays.hu and on page 7 of the present Trade magazine issue.

Every toy is in use in our own playground as well. Trade magazin’s very successful Issue 2-3 was the official journal of the biggest food and HoReCa trade show. At the trade show we built the Future Store Innovation booth for the 7th time. The first time we set up the store of the future, its floor space was 150m², but this year the shop covered an area of more than 700m². Twelve years ago the Future Store had 300 visitors, this time more than 1,200 people came and we are very proud of this. In 2020 our booth won the marketing award of the Hungarian Marketing Association, and this year we won a special award, together with the 24 companies exhibiting at us – we have to thank them as well. Visitors could sign on for guided tours around the Future Store, which started every 30 minutes, to see the latest innovative retail solutions, services and products, which we think have good chances for forming part of retail systems in the future. You can learn lots more about them in this extraordinary Issue 4-5 of our magazine,

This spring we were glad to present the awards of the Sirha Innovation Product Competition, and we are preparing for more award ceremonies to celebrate the winners of the Most Successful Promotion of the Year and Inno d’Or – Innovation of the Year, and in the autumn these will be followed by rewarding the best works in the Symbol of Sustainability and StarStore – Év kereskedője competitions. In the meantime our magazine also won the MagyarBrands prize in March – we are really proud of this recognition.

We must keep climbing upwards on that frame, constantly paying attention where we put our feet and not forgetting that the end of the game is still a long way away. On 26 May we will host an innovation conference and the Business Dinner, and we are looking forward to seeing you there, before the always exciting summer is followed by us spending 5 days together, at the Business Days conference in the Trade Playhouse in Tapolca. //

Best regards,
Zsuzsanna Hermann, Editor in Chief