HostMilano: At Your Service
Combining three shows – HostMilano, TuttoFood and Meat-Tech – into one massive event helped diversify the multitude of hospitality, food service and catering industry offerings to professionals still a little unsure about returning to the world of in-person trade shows. It certainly worked: more than 150,000 trade visitors crowded the aisles of Fiera Milano.
Aēralab | Iberital
A winner of one of four SMART Labels in the Innovation category (an in-show award program that highlights products exemplifying sustainability, hygiene, personalization and flexibility), this machine recognizes the different types of milk (from dairy to plant-based), quantity and freshness in the pitcher, and instantly adapts the foaming process thereby allowing baristas to create the best possible foam for their preparations. And it auto-cleans after every serve.
Caementum | Pedrali
A significant trend on display was new product collections that transform outdoor spaces into elegant open-air living rooms. This new single-piece concrete table designed by Marco Merendi and Diego Vencato specifically for outdoor use employs additives to enhance ease of cleaning, greater resistance to mechanical stresses and weathering, and low permeability to liquids and stains.
Doga Collection | Nardi
Fresh, light and ergonomic, Doga is the new outdoor furniture collection, designed by Raffaello Galiotto, consisting of chairs with and without armrests, a lounge chair and a monobloc low table made of fibreglass resin, all inspired by an interplay of open and closed spaces punctuated by a sequence of horizontal slats.
Skallop Collection | Kütahya Porselen
According to their creator, the ever-prodigious Karim Rashid, the Skallop Collection is based on a “contradicting perfection.” What does he mean by that? Well, “most tabletop dishes are pure and have a circular form; whereas nature is organic, fluid, and completely irregular in form, shape and colour. So, the idea of Skallop is to create a democratic collection of dishes that appear handmade and give a sense of imperfection to marry nature and food in our organic ritual of eating,” says Rashid.
Factory | Tognana Professional
To celebrate its 75th anniversary, the Italian tableware company brought several new lines to HostMilano including Factory, which uses an advanced digital printing technique to capture the current trend of textured moods that “frames the food as if it were a painter’s palette.” Nine patterns on six different items, for a total of 18 dishes, encourages a mix-and-match approach to table settings.
Troy’s Pick: Principessa Combo
Troy Dashney is principal at Edmonton-based Bold Interior Design Inc. and also an avid fan of gelato. Being finely tuned to the nuances of both the craft and the technology that goes into making an exceptional batch of the delectable frozen dessert, while roaming the halls at HostMilano 2021 one remarkable new item jumped out at him.
Principessa Combo is a movable gelato batch freezer which combines both the production and storage phases. The newest advancement of the Revolution freezing station, Combo is based on the same technology – a glycol-free direct drive motor and cooling system – but is adaptable to any project, and able to be assembled according to nearly any space need of entrepreneurs and gelato masters.
Of particular interest to Troy is how the “new unit is designed to drop into an owner-supplied millwork cabinet or counter,” he says, not only allowing full-integration of the technology into a finely detailed interior space, but also pulling what is typically a back-of-house operation to the front, for all to see.
