BERLIN BUZZ!! Conference & Trade Show a Huge Success!!

October 23, 2013

This year, the 20th Anniversary WE Berlin Event attracted more suppliers than have been seen on our exhibition floor for years!

Delegates were served a fabulous lunch right in the trade show, and this gave an unprecedented opportunity to mingle and network with other Bottlers, Distributors and Operators, as well as Suppliers. The Conference and Workshops offered some fresh faces and topics from outside the industry - marketing, branding and stress management - as well as some important annual updates such as Zenith’s status research on the European water cooler industry.

The Gala Dinner & Show was also terrifically well-attended and the Soul and Rhythm&Blues music “rocked our world”. Watch for a special website article on the annual Aqua Awards, where we had large numbers of nominations and some stiff competition in each category and saw some very innovative new products and promotional videos and websites. We were also honoured to host many members of the Asian & Middle East Bottled Water Association and the Japanese Association, who attended the Gala and Trade Show and held their meetings during our event.

A special addition to the Event was the inauguration of the Watercoolers Europe Hall of Fame. This honour list recognised some of those industry figures who have toiled tirelessly in the background (or on the front stage!) to make Watercoolers Europe a truly international, politically relevant, standard-setting, modern lobbying organization. All of the past Chairs of the Association were presented with Hall of Fame certificates – these are the centre stage guys! But people as diverse as our standard creators Bob Tanner (now retired, from NSF) and Mike Hurst (one of our Expert Corner contributors, from Watermark Consultancy) and Jeroen Peters (recently from Nestle Waters, a visionary Chair who brought Facebook and Twitter to WE) were also honoured. In a business that has been male dominated for years, we also had a couple of female honourees, Diane Koyich from Crystal Mountain, Chair of several committees, Execo member and past ICBWA Chair, and Valbona Malo, the new representative from NSF in Europe, still working hard on standards in the POU Committee. Watch for a comprehensive list of the winners to be published shortly on the website and in Cooler Innovations magazine.

WE thanks all of you who attended for your support from the booming city of Berlin, and encourages our members (and non-members) to attend next years’ show in the lovely historic city of Budapest.

Photo credits: Dan Kollmann