attendees

How to Wow People with a Vegan Menu

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If you're going to be serving food at your event, it's important to choose menu items that everyone can and will eat. This will be hard if you try to make a different menu for all of the many common dietary variations. Instead, try combining gluten-free and vegan to create dishes that almost everyone will love. One of the most important things you'll need to keep in mind is the difference between vegetarian and vegan. Vegetarian dishes may include eggs, milk, and other products that ultimately come from animals. Vegan food, on the other hand, includes none of that. Only plants and plant products are allowed.

Choosing the Menu Items

The key to wowing a mixed-preference audience with vegan dishes is to avoid the bland, diet-type fare non-vegans often associate with this type of food. Instead, make sure the meals are tasty. Hire caterers that use spices and sauces liberally to pump up the flavor volume and add delicious-looking color to the dishes. Also, make sure that your catering company is used to cooking for vegans. Such companies will have plenty of delicious recipes already developed.

If You Can Field Two Menus, Offer Both Meat and Meat-Free Options

When you're providing lunch, meat-eaters likely won't be too put out if they don't get any meat in the meal. The same cannot be said of dinner. Unless your company gets marketing points from going all-vegan, offer a meat-included menu for this meal along with the vegan one. Note, however, that some vegans insist that their food be cooked in different areas than those used to cook meat! Fortunately, there are some caterers out there that will actually cater to even this demand.

Always Remember the Possibility of Allergies

The days when you could just serve a mystery sauce or meal are over. For reasons that are not quite understood, the incidence of life-threatening food allergies is higher than it was just 30 or 40 years ago. Therefore, you should always list potential food allergens. It's also important to know for certain exactly what is in everything, vegan or not.

This isn't to say that it's dangerous to serve meals. You simply need to know what is in all of the food so you and your staff can give accurate answers to those who ask about the ingredients.

With these things in mind, you'll be able to serve anything from a snack to a feast and have it be both safe and impressive. The final thing you'll need is a venue. If your event is in Miami, try our event and exhibition area here at Soho Studios. We offer up to 70,000 square feet that can be configured to meet all of your event needs.

Pop Up Event Trend: How Popular Mechanics made DIYers out of Attendees

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Popular Mechanics has been in the game for a while, helping DIY pros reinvigorate their lifestyles with new, exciting opportunities. While not typically found chilling with Esquire and GQ, its newest approach to industry appearance has revitalized some of its deeper aspects. Popular Mechanics invented The Lodge: The Ultimate Winter Clubhouse. Event-goers were invited to partake in the stylishness underlining Popular Mechanics. Of course, feasts, crafts and cocktails were part of the package.

Brand Modernization

Today, brands face industry growth with intensity. Unsurprisingly, constant modernization is responsible for success. Popular Mechanics, displayed through the Hearst publication, powered The Lodge by inviting over 500 attendees. The Lodge was a modern digital extravaganza, offering hands-on demos, industry news and tastings. The Hearst, having celebrated its 115th anniversary, assisted Popular Mechanics with an intelligent team of publication partners and editors.

New advertisers, too, were present. Popular Mechanics has worked on reinvigorating its public appearance for years. While media appearances worked well in the past, a closer approach was needed to redistribute creativity and harness success. The Lodge, in essence, served to embody the modern industry’s latest, greatest technological features.

A Massive Event Space

The Ultimate Winter Weekend Clubhouse was established in Kinfolk94—which is a well-known retail and event space powered in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg section. The event prioritized earthy tones, pinpointing the Popular Mechanics DIY vibe with backdrops, beer and digital outdoor landscape displays. Facebook Live, meanwhile, helped event-goers share demos, activate premium digital options and view trending GIFs.

Timothy Dahl, West Coast editor for Popular Mechanics, demoed the brand’s DIY firewood coasters. A Dremel hand tool seminar and workshop was had, as was a meeting with Slightly Alabama’s Dana Glaser. Attendees were invited to craft Brooklyn leather accessories, custom leather wallets and other designs. Knickerbocker MFG’s Brian Brinkley, meanwhile, helped attendees customize bandanas, craft new retro looks and discuss modern style.

Meeting in the Middle

Because Popular Mechanics upholds the virtues of “rustic living,” craftiness and resourcefulness, its public extravaganza in The Lodge offered a highly unique opportunity. Industry appearances can be grown. They can also be adapted. By pairing technology with its age-old love of all things DIY, Popular Mechanics proved itself to be a long-term provider wile molding to new marketing demands.

Among its wonderful presenters, Popular Mechanics enlisted Jeff Conley—a neo-folk musician—to perform with a DIY ukulele crafted from a YETI water bottle. If the display didn’t depict the new Popular Mechanics approach enough, Blue Moon’s beer tastings certainly warmed patrons up. The Popular Mechanics experience was a practical one, where hands-on experiences surpassed industry expectations. The marketer’s struggle, today, exists in adapting old ideas to an ever-growing, increasingly demanding, industry. Fortunately, old dogs can learn new tricks—and Popular Mechanics is one of the oldest dogs around.