Two Days, One Convention Centre, and Way Too Much Coffee

My feet are still recovering, if I'm honest.

I left Queensland's biggest food trade shows weekend at BCEC Brisbane last week with sore arches, a bag of coffee beans I had zero business buying, and a story about a pizza guy I can't stop telling people at dinner parties. So let's start with him.

He was maybe thirty seconds from the buzzer when I wandered past. QLD Pizza Championships, live judging, an actual crowd forming three deep around a bloke I never got the name of. I wasn't even planning to stop. I had exhibitors to see, a schedule taped to the inside of my brain that I was already ignoring by 10 am. But he tossed the dough, caught it, and for one weirdly tense second the whole clump of strangers around me just… went quiet. Like we were all holding our breath for a man we'd never met, watching him decide the fate of a margherita.

I stood there for twenty minutes. Missed two appointments I'd actually scheduled in advance. No regrets, none whatsoever.

There was a kid next to me, maybe eight or nine, dragged along by a parent who worked in the industry, and he was more invested in that pizza than half the adults around him. Kept tugging his mum's sleeve, asking if the guy was going to win. I don't know if he did, in the end; I got pulled away before the final scores came through. But somewhere out there is a small Queenslander convinced that guy took home gold, and honestly, good for him.

Coffee wasn't even on my radar going in. I drink one flat white a day; that's my ceiling, and I told myself I'd give the Café & Coffee Experience a polite ten-minute wander before moving on to the “real” work. Forty minutes later I was still there, holding a tiny tasting cup, nodding along to a roaster explaining altitude and processing methods with the kind of intensity most people reserve for their actual life's calling. I lost the thread somewhere around the third pour. Kept nodding anyway. Bought the beans on the way out, plus a grinder I absolutely did not budget for this month.

But the bit that actually got me, the part I keep turning over days later, happened near the Producers Hub. Tucked between two much bigger, much shinier stands was a woman selling native ingredient blends. Wattleseed. Lemon myrtle. Small setup, just her and one other person, a fraction of the real estate the big brands had.

She told me she started the business after losing her mum. Family recipes, knowledge that had been sitting around for years without ever turning into anything, and here she was now, in a hall roughly the size of an aircraft hangar, trying to catch the eye of buyers who'd never once heard her name before that morning.

I bought a jar of her lemon myrtle salt. It's on my kitchen bench right now. Every time I reach for it I think about her standing there, this quiet determination underneath the nerves.

Look, I wrote up the practical side of this Queensland food event properly elsewhere: dates, stages, and what's actually on the show floor this year, if that's what you're after. But none of that is really why I keep going back year after year. I go for moments like hers. The kind that don't fit into a bullet-pointed rundown.

I think I walked in expecting something more corporate than it turned out to be. Convention centre, lanyards, that whole sterile trade-show aesthetic I usually brace myself for. It wasn't like that, not really. Maybe food people just can't help wearing their personalities closer to the surface than most industries manage. By the second day I'd stopped networking in any real sense and was just talking to people, genuinely curious why anyone signs up for an industry this exhausting and unpredictable in the first place.

There was a chef at the Chef's Table stage too, young, maybe mid-twenties, plating something built almost entirely around finger lime and saltbush. Halfway through her demo, she just stopped and admitted, in front of a crowd of strangers, that she'd burnt the exact same dish twice that morning in rehearsal. Everyone laughed. She laughed. Then kept going like it hadn't happened. That small moment of someone letting the mask slip has stuck with me longer than most of the polished stuff I saw that day.

If you're weighing up whether to go next year, here's my honest advice: don't. I mean, do go, obviously; this is one of the Queensland food trade shows worth clearing a weekend for, but don't try to plan it down to the minute. The good stuff hides in the gaps you didn't schedule. Wear shoes that can survive six hours on concrete. Say yes when someone offers you a sample or a five-minute chat, even when you're supposed to be somewhere else already.

I walked out with sore feet, an unnecessary grinder, a jar of salt I now genuinely can't cook without, and this stubborn feeling that Queensland's food and hospitality scene is in good hands. Slightly chaotic hands, sure. But good ones.

Would I do it again tomorrow, sore feet and all? Without hesitation.