The National Restaurant Association Show fills McCormick Place every May with the foodservice industry. We build exhibits with sampling bars, demo kitchens, and warm hospitality.
The National Restaurant Association Show is the foodservice industry's flagship North American event, filling McCormick Place every May with restaurant operators, distributors, dealers, and buyers who come to taste, touch, and source the products that will fill their menus and operations. Exhibiting here is fundamentally about hospitality and service, because the brands that win get their product into a buyer's hand and make the experience memorable. We build exhibits for the Restaurant Show around that truth. The heart of the stand is the serving experience: a generous sampling bar with comfortable approach frontage, a demo kitchen equipped with cooktops, prep counters, and warming or refrigeration equipment, and a service flow engineered to keep lines moving during the intense peak hours when the aisles fill. We plan the practical infrastructure that makes service possible, the electrical for cooking and refrigeration and any plumbing allowances the show permits, coordinated with McCormick Place jurisdiction and validated in a pre-show staging review so nothing fails during the rush. Appetite appeal drives the visual design, with rich materials, mouth-watering backlit product imagery, branded serving vessels, and lighting tuned to make food look its best, all produced in-house with silicone edge fabric and dye-sublimation so color stays vivid under hall lighting and in your post-show content. We balance the open serving zones against seating and conversation space where your team can talk distribution, pricing, and programs with operators and brokers once the sample has done its work, and at island sizes we provide a hospitality lounge that gives your best prospects a reason to linger. Sizing is flexible: a debut brand can sample effectively from a 10x20 with a single serving bar, while established food companies anchor 20x20 through 30x40 islands with multiple sampling stations, a full demo kitchen, and hospitality, all inside the published price bands. Because the Restaurant Show is large and specialized food-service millwork is in demand, we recommend reserving design and hardware ahead of the May move-in, and we manage the food-service infrastructure planning this event uniquely requires. We deliver the program full-service, from a free 48-hour 3D rendering through install and dismantle, so you can get your product tasted without buying or storing specialized equipment. Request your rendering and we will design a stand built to feed a crowd and close buyers.
The National Restaurant Association Show is held annually in May at McCormick Place in Chicago. It is the foodservice industry's flagship North American event, drawing operators, distributors, and buyers across restaurants, hospitality, and institutional foodservice.
Yes. Exhibits for the National Restaurant Association Show routinely feature sampling bars, demo kitchens with cooktops and prep counters, refrigeration, and serving frontage, engineered for the show's electrical and any plumbing allowances and coordinated with McCormick Place.
A debut brand can sample from a 10x20 with a serving bar, while established food companies anchor 20x20 to 30x40 islands with multiple sampling stations, a demo kitchen, and hospitality, all within the published price bands.
Call Chicago Exhibits at (872) 369-0187 for a free 48-hour 3D rendering. Serving Chicago and McCormick Place since 2014.