Trade Show Vegan goes to IBTM World

As I set out for Barcelona for IBTM World 2023 and the final leg of my Trade Show Vegan challenge, I had a spring in my step.

After all, I've had almost a full year of practice at being vegan at trade shows. I've become pretty skilled at unearthing plant-based options in cities and conference centres across Europe. Not only has it been surprisingly straightforward, but it's also been a fun adventure as well; I've met new people, tried new food and generally felt healthier. So I was excited to see what my trip to Spain for IBTM World would bring.

First up was a spot of breakfast at Gatwick Airport. Now, I'll let you into one of my top travel tips: the best place to have breakfast at an airport? Wagamama.

Seriously, no one else goes to Wagamama for breakfast, so you're guaranteed a table and quick service. They do a full English breakfast, a full range of pancakes, eggs and pastries - all served in relative peace and quiet. What's not to love?

Anyway, more relevantly, they also do a full vegan breakfast - vegan bacon, jackfruit sausage, tomato, mushroom, katsu sweet potato, sriracha ketchup, toasted bao and some kind of tofu-based scrambled egg. Perfect pre-flight scran, apart from the slippery pretend egg, which I had trouble keeping on the fork, and then rather wished I hadn't bothered. Still, very decent effort all round from Wagamama.

Wagamama's 'Full Vegan' breakfast

Banana and almond milk smoothie

Chickpea and butternut squash curry

A few hours later I was in Barcelona - and it was lunchtime. Now for the first real challenge of the trip. I pulled up Google Maps, searched for restaurants and was inundated with results. Refining this to 'vegan restaurants' however, made for decidedly slimmer pickings.

Nonetheless, the virtuously named Healthy Bowls promised plant-based options and was a mere skip and a jump away, so I wandered over and discovered a highly Instagrammable little cafe churning out big bowls full of fresh, appealing and largely vegan ingredients. I enjoyed a banana and almond smoothie and a chickpea and butternut squash curry, and all was right with the world.

Unfortunately though, the ease with which I had acquired vegan food thus far on my trip was shortly about to come to an abrupt end.

That evening, I met my colleagues in the bar of our hotel with a view to us all heading out to get something to eat. The question of where to go was soon answered, as it often is, by a consensus that we'd go to "that tapas place we went to last year".

Tapas! That would be vegan-friendly, surely? My experience of tapas told me that there'd be lots of things on the menu. And the more things there are on the menu, the more vegan options there are likely to be, right? That's just maths.

The restaurant in question turned out to be El Nacional, a self-styled gastronomic experience in the heart of Barcelona, offering at least four distinct dining options.

A large amount of ham

A large amount of ham

We snagged a table in close proximity to a large amount of delicious-looking ham. Spain is justly famous for its ham, and the glistening display of delicate ribbons of salty sweet goodness briefly made me consider sacking the whole vegan thing off entirely.

However, I managed to retain my composure and got stuck into the menu, putting the ham out of my mind. I couldn't see anything denoting any vegan options on the menu, and an attempt to quiz the waiter on which dishes were plant-based did not go as well as it might have. Therefore I decided the best plan was to just order a few bits and pieces of things that might be vegan - and hope for the best.

Somehow we ended up ordering a vast amount of pan con tomate, the dish where you rub a cut tomato onto fresh bread and add olive oil and salt. That's as vegan as vegan can be! I set about this with gusto, aware that it might be the only thing I would definitely be able to eat that evening.

Delicious as it was though, a person cannot live on cold damp bread alone. I'd picked out a few other potential vegan dishes, including patatas bravas, padron peppers, gazpacho and breaded mushrooms. The patatas bravas claimed to come with a spicy tomato sauce, which sounded fine. However, it actually turned up topped with a huge dollop of unadvertised garlic mayo. Uh oh. Grimacing slightly, I ate around the unwanted emulsion to the best of my ability.

The gazpacho arrived very charmingly presented with some mini-breadsticks floating atop the oil-slicked broth, and while very tasty, I again found myself lamenting the amount of cold, damp food I was eating.

Thankfully, my mushrooms turned up at that point; huge, meaty slabs of fungi liberally coated in breadcrumbs and fresh from the frier. I finally felt like I was getting something substantial to eat - but was it vegan? Well, I can't say for sure. Look up any recipe for breaded mushrooms, and it generally advises the use of eggs to adhere the breadcrumbs to the mushrooms.

"Out of sight, out of mind" I decided, and chowed down enthusiastically. However, there's no getting away from the fact that my vegan efforts had become a little slapdash in Spain. If I'd been a real, strict vegan, I'd have made a more concerted effort to check it was plant-based. And I suspect I would have struggled in that restaurant to eat very much at all. Mildly discouraged, I headed back to the hotel to rest up ahead of the first day of IBTM World.

The next morning at breakfast in the hotel things weren't much better. Labels were non-existent, and the only vegan option on the hot buffet seemed to be baked beans. I instead decided to go for a bowl of muesli, eventually tracking down a sad-looking jug of soy milk to splash over it. What with this and the previous night's disappointment, I was beginning to feel a bit left out. Was Spain going to be a step too far for the Trade Show Vegan?

Thankfully, on arrival at the show, things picked up immeasurably. Because really, IBTM World had clearly made the effort to make this year's show as vegan-inclusive as possible. Every cafe I found had a plant-based option as a main, there were plenty of vegan snacks available, even the press centre had vegan options, and best of all, right in the centre of the show was HANNA, an entirely vegan food truck.

Honestly, my heart jumped when I first saw this beacon of choice and inclusivity. It's the little things that make the biggest difference, and the fact that someone had made sure that there was something nice for me to eat at IBTM World was a real joy. Obviously, they didn't put it there for me specifically - but that's how it felt. At lunchtime I chowed down on a seitan burger dripping with fake cheese and spicy sauce, a generous, full-of-flavour lunch that didn't make me feel left out in the way I had in my previous two meals.

Muesli :(

A happy vegan

Getting stuck into a seitan burger

And this is the crucial point, I guess. There is plenty of research to show that a vegan diet is hugely less damaging to the environment than a meat-based diet. For an industry that talks about sustainability no end, it is gratifying to note that at our trade shows, we put our money where our mouth is and are inclusive of those sustainable options.

No one should be made to feel left out for wanting to eat a plant-based diet - and I'm happy to say, that when it comes to events organised by our sector, my experience of the last year shows that no one is.

There may be issues elsewhere in some areas of wider society about vegan and plant-based inclusivity - but as far as eventprofs are concerned, we're doing ok.

Mine was a whistletstop trip to Barcelona this year, so after another tapas meal that evening and another sad muesli breakfast, I was back in the UK and no longer bound by plant-based rules.

While this is the end of the (award-winning!) Trade Show Vegan blog for 2023, it's not something I'm going to give up on. As I mentioned, it's been a really fun thing to do and it's led to a lot of great conversations with fascinating people. And so while I won't be blogging about it with the same regularity, I'll definitely be flying the Trade Show Vegan flag for the foreseeable future.

Here's a few things I've learned from the last 12 months as a Trade Show Vegan

- The events industry is - mostly - extremely inclusive of vegan and plant-based diets

- People in the sector love, love, love talking about food

- If you want oat milk in your drink, try to avoid asking for it "with oat milk", as the person serving you will often mishear it as "without milk" and you'll end up with an undrinkable cup of black tea (happened at least five times)

- You feel healthier after eating a vegan meal than you do after eating a large amount of ham

- Some non-vegans can be surprisingly hostile and will try quite hard to catch you out - it's a lot of fun to wind these people up

- In any major city, you are rarely more than a stone's throw from something delicious and plant-based to eat. So get stuck in!

Back to M&IT

Trade Show Vegan goes to IBTM World

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