Fancy Food Show: A fast track to retailers

Three years ago, Gianluigi Dellaccio figured he had a good thing going when he started supplying gelato to a Pennsylvania Turnpike service plaza, where sweets-starved travelers were buying it in numbers far greater than from the previous tenant, a Hershey’s stand. Management was so pleased, it signed Dellacio’s Dolci Gelati to a second location on the pike.

But the King of Prussia rest area, not far from Philadelphia, didn’t prove as successful for Dellaccio as the first plaza, farther west on the toll road. The sluggish sales, in fact, left Dellaccio with an underutilized asset at his Northeast D.C. factory: a second gelato machine, which Dolci Gelati now cranks up only when the King of Prussia plaza places a large order.

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To put his machine back to work, Dellaccio last year visited the Fancy Food Show in New York City, an annual expo where thousands of food manufacturers pushing nearly 180,000 items can meet tens of thousands of retailers, from small shops such as Cork Market in Logan Circle to major warehouses such as Costco. Dellaccio’s mission was to gather information from fellow food producers about the show, which is closed to the public.

“I asked them how beneficial it was to them, and everybody gave me a terrific review,” Dellaccio says.

So this year, as the Fancy Food Show pulls into the Walter E. Washington Convention Center for three days beginning Sunday, Dellaccio has decided to plunk down the money to exhibit his line of gelati at the event.

It’s not cheap. First off, Dellaccio had to join the National Association for the Specialty Food Trade, the Manhattan-based nonprofit organization that produces two of these massive exhibitions a year, one in San Francisco and one on the East Coast, typically in New York. (The show will pitch a tent in Washington this year and next as its usual home, the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York, undergoes renovations.) The association’s dues run $200 to $600 a year, depending on a company’s annual sales.

Then the gelato vendor had to buy a booth at the show. A 10-by-10-foot space will cost him $3,400, which doesn’t include the $500 fee Dellaccio must shell out to be placed on the exhibitors’ map, nor the $750 he will have to pay for the electricity to power his gelato case. All told, this Fancy Food Show opportunity will run him more than $5,000, not counting the $1,000 worth of gelato he will pass out during the three days at the convention center.

A larger company could better absorb those marketing costs, but Dolci Gelati is still a relative newbie in the specialty food trade. It launched in 2006, not long after the Turin native and trained pastry chef stopped working at Roberto Donna’s previous incarnation of Galileo on 21st Street NW. The company, at the peak of its summer production, employs only 10 people who nonetheless churn out enough of Dellaccio’s gelato to supply not only the turnpike plazas but also 15 area Whole Foods locations, Nationals Park, the National Zoo, and markets and restaurants such as Vace, Dean & Deluca and Taylor Gourmet.