Smoothie Operator

As a supplier of nutritional products and supplements, my company, Monroe, WI-based Glanbia Nutritionals Inc., likes to think it has enough muscle to handle any challenge. But when the blenders in our new booth came up a bit weak at the 2008 SupplySide West (SSW) show in Las Vegas, we had to use brains rather than brawn to tackle our calamity.

In the weeks leading up to SSW, I was excited about our new booth, a custom exhibit we affectionately called Slurp. The booth — a pair of 10-by-20-foot displays situated across the aisle from one another — would serve up smoothies fortified with our delicious whey proteins and flax in one half, and feature a seat-filled drinking-and-mingling area in the other.

I’d even purchased some high-powered $1,500 blenders to mix the drinks. With their onboard computers and tornado-esque mixing capacity, I figured they’d take a lot of current, but they’d also add the right blend of speed and technology to energize our smoothie-bar booth.

So one of my biggest concerns for the show was ensuring we had the right amount of electrical power for the exhibit. Thus, we gave our booth components — including these high-powered blenders — a quick test run back at the home office. Since the blenders and components powered up without a single glitch, we confidently shipped Slurp to Vegas.

Once on show site, setup went pretty much as planned. In fact, when I headed off to bed the night before the show, there were only two minor items on my to-do list for the following morning: Install some brackets in our display, and collect our smoothie ingredients from the caterer.

So the next day when I arrived on the show floor at 7 a.m., I was focused on those last two details. However, when I walked across my booth, I noticed some water soaked into our carpet. Fearing a plumbing problem, I felt around on the carpet for more water, but it seemed to be concentrated in one spot. I figured someone probably just helped themselves to some of our water and spilled. I put that mess out of my mind, and went about finalizing the last two details.

I was even more relieved a few minutes later when someone from show services told me there had been a little water leak overnight, which had since been fixed. Apparently, when the booth was powered down for the evening, the pump that sent water to our booth turned off, and the liquid already in the lines drained into our booth.

With the moisture mystery solved and my two tasks accomplished, I concentrated on more important matters, like the attendees who would soon be filing into our booth for a smoothie. But as the show opened and our smoothie bar started serving the masses, catastrophe struck. The electricity on the smoothie-bar side of our exhibit zapped out. So with dozens of attendees demanding their smoothies, I had my $1,500 blenders, but no electricity to make them spin.

In a moment of panic, I tried to move the blenders to the seating side of the exhibit despite the fact that I’d ordered my electricity based on the exact needs of each side of the booth. But maybe, I prayed, the electricians had over-powered the seating side. Alas, they had not, for when I plugged in my fancy blenders, the electricity zapped out in the seating half as well.

With the power out for my entire booth — which was now filled with a host of thirsty attendees — I needed to power up fast, or this show was going to be anything but a smoothie success.

I quickly ran to show services to gather a handful of electricians. We then high-tailed it back to the exhibit where they assessed the cause of the power outage. The electricians soon informed me that I had tripped both breakers for my booth, and while they could restore power to the seating side quickly, the smoothie-bar side would require a bit more work. It seemed the water on the carpet had made its way into the power cords and created a short circuit that needed to be fixed.

While the electricians got to work, I finagled a deal with the show’s catering service. With its permission, I moved some of my blenders to the concessions area and stationed one of my co-workers over there mixing up batch after batch of each smoothie flavor. As soon as each batch was mixed, staffers carried it back — bucket-brigade style — to the booth.

Before long, we’d amassed a nice supply of mixed smoothies in the booth, and the brigade was going strong, so I sat back and smiled at my genius. But my smile was short-lived. For as the blenders kept blending and blending, their onboard computers sensed that the things were getting a bit overheated. So one after another, my $1,500 blenders shut themselves off. Apparently the machines preferred to fade away rather than burn out.

Once again I was without blenders, but this time I had a few minutes to think since we had several extra batches of smoothies still available in the exhibit. So I gathered my team of staffers and began brainstorming.

The first suggestion was to go to Wal-Mart and buy a dozen of the biggest blenders available, making sure these mixers had no computers to get in the way. After all, if I burned out a dozen cheap blenders, it’d still be less expensive than my temperamental $1,500 boondoggles.

As we brainstormed, though, the young lady we’d hired from show services as a hostess had another option. She informed us that the caterer had a couple of the big blenders you might find in a New Orleans bar mixing margaritas. So we ran back to catering and checked them out, discovering that these big mixers would do the job. Granted, they required a bit more power, but the electricians — still holed up in my booth fixing the initial problem — said they could up my amps while they were at it. In fact, they could quickly make the change.

So I begged show services for the margarita mixers, dragged them back to my booth, and powered them up. We were once again back in business.

In the end, the smoothie delay — from the blown fuse in the booth to the margarita-mixer solution — took about 90 minutes. While it seemed like days rather than minutes, it didn’t damper our exhibit’s overall performance. We’d initially hoped to serve about 700 smoothies at the two-day show, but ended up pouring drinks for 1,800 attendees.

It seems after all our power went down the drain, a single suggestion from a hired hostess was all the power we needed to keep our smoothie booth running, well, smoothly.

— Kathleen Bolton, trade show and marketing specialist, Glanbia Nutritionals Inc., Monroe, WI