What We Learned at Our First Summer Fancy Food Show

By Ash, Namkeen Queens

I went to the Summer Fancy Food Show planning to build a corporate gifting pipeline.

I came home with retail buyer leads instead.

That’s not a complaint. That’s just what happens when you walk into a room you’ve never been in before with assumptions about what the room wants. You learn fast.

 

Here’s the full story.

Why We Went

The Summer Fancy Food Show is the largest specialty food event in North America. Three days at the Javits Center in New York City. Thousands of buyers, distributors, brokers, and food professionals in one place.

We didn’t go for revenue. You don’t close deals at a food show. You go for building your pipeline. You go to be in the room. You go so that when someone tastes your product and asks "how do I get more of this," you have a conversation, not just a website.

My goal going in was specific: corporate gifting leads. We were going to be introducing  three gifting tiers at Namkeen Queens and I wanted to put them in front of companies looking for premium, culturally meaningful gift options.

That plan... partially worked out. More on that in a minute.

What We Brought

500+ pre-portioned sample servings of Dink Ladoo and Chivda across three days. Our full packaging line on display including the “soon to be launched” customizable gift collection. 

We were at Booth 4315 with The Jazba Collective... a pavilion of South Asian food founders. More on them later because honestly, that deserves its own section.

The sampling plan was intentional. Dink Ladoo because it’s our most distinctive product -- the one that makes people stop and ask "what is this?" Chivda because it’s instantly approachable, crunchy, and hard to eat just one of. The two products that do the most work of explaining what Namkeen Queens is in a single bite.

What Actually Happened

The thing I was most nervous about: what happens when someone tastes Aai’s food without any context? No Instagram. No story about Mumbai and New York. Just the food.

People went quiet.

Mid-sentence, they’d try the Dink Ladoo and stop talking. Then reach for another one. It happened enough times across three days that I stopped being surprised by it and started just... watching for it. The face change. The pause. The second reach.

That’s what Aai’s cooking does. It doesn’t need a pitch.

What I didn’t expect was how many people had a story to hand back to us. 

• "My grandmother made something like this."

•  "I grew up eating this." 

• "My family is from Gujarat -- I haven’t had dink ladoo since I left India." 

We weren’t just handing out samples. We were handing back memories.

That’s the thing nobody tells you about bringing Indian food into a specialty food space. The diaspora is everywhere. And the moment they taste something real -- not a fusion version, not an "inspired by" version, but the actual thing someone’s mother or grandmother made -- something happens. They don’t just buy. They feel something.

What Surprised Us (The Honest Version)

I went in targeting corporate gifting. I came out with retail buyer leads. Completely different world -- different conversations, different questions, different timelines, different compliance requirements.

The retail buyers cared about things I hadn’t fully thought through going in. Shelf life came up more than I expected. Buyers want to know how long a product can sit on a shelf before it needs to move. Our snacks are made with no preservatives, which is a real differentiator -- but it also means shelf life is shorter than mass-produced alternatives. That’s a conversation I wasn’t fully prepared for. I am now.

What exceeded expectations: the warmth. People were genuinely curious. Not politely curious -- actually curious. The Dink Ladoo sparked more "what is this ingredient?" conversations than I’d anticipated. The edible gum story, the frying transformation, the postpartum tradition -- people leaned in. That’s the kind of product education that’s hard to do online and much easier in person.

Also: the people who came back. Someone would try a sample, walk away, and then show up again 20 minutes later. Or the next day. Because they couldn’t stop thinking about it. Those are the leads worth following. The ones who came back.

The Jazba Collective

I want to talk about this because it mattered more than I thought it would going in.

The Jazba Collective is an organization co-founded by Asha and Ruchira to elevate South Asian consumer brands across North America. By bringing our brands together under one pavilion, they created a stronger collective presence that showcased the richness and diversity of South Asian products and helped the industry recognize the growing impact of South Asian entrepreneurs.

Going in as part of a collective rather than alone changed the entire energy of the booth.

We weren’t one small Indian snack brand trying to get noticed in a massive show. We were a statement. South Asian founders, side by side, showing the specialty food industry what our cuisines and cultures have to offer. There’s a version of showing up alone at something like this. This was better. A lot better.

It also meant a different kind of foot traffic. People came to the pavilion curious about the collection, not just one brand. And then they’d move from booth to booth, tasting, asking questions, making connections across the collective. That’s not something you get if you’re an island.

If you’re a food founder considering a trade show for the first time -- find your collective. Find the people building in the same space or even better find an organization like Jazba and go together…The room feels different.

What’s Next

The follow-ups.

That’s it. That’s what SFA’s Summer Fancy Food Show opened up and that’s where the work is now. Every lead from those three days gets a personal email this week. Every "let’s stay in touch" gets a response. Every retail buyer conversation gets a follow-up with the shelf life answers and label details I didn’t have at the booth.

This wasn’t a revenue event. It was a pipeline event. The pipeline is now real. What we do with it is the whole question.

We’ll be back at the Fancy Food Show. But we’ll go in knowing more. Retail buyer conversations need different prep than corporate gifting conversations. Shelf life documentation matters. The sampling quantities were right. The product selection was right. The collective was absolutely right.

The first time you do anything, you learn things you couldn’t have learned any other way. This was that.

The Snacks that stopped people Mid-Sentence

If you want to know what all the fuss was about, you don’t have to wait for next year’s food show.

Dink Ladoo and Chivda ship to your door in our signature reusable tins. No preservatives. Handmade by Aai and our small team in Mumbai.

 

Shop Dink Ladoo: namkeenqueens.com/products/dink-ladoo

Shop Chivda: namkeenqueens.com/products/chivda

 

Namkeen Queens -- Indian snacks, elevated.