Food Show Displays for Country Maid, Inc.

Food Show Displays for Country Maid, Inc.

This was my first attempt at helping out with the food show displays. The theme was, "On the Road to Success." I wasn't really given a budget, but I was also pretty much told not to spend any money. My big ticket items were the semi-truck and the cloth for the tablecloths. I removed the stickers from the truck (Farm & Fleet - $18.99) and replaced them with stickers printed out on material that I had in stock to make a Country Maid Truck. I bought a few yards of cheap green fabric and hemmed the edges myself. I'm not the greatest tailor in the world, but they weren't TOO crooked. I used black felt and a white paint marker to create roads that could be placed on the green fabric. All the signs were printed on an inkjet and pasted to foam core and then cut out. The larger signs were hand painted using frisket masking and spray paint. I picked up a battery powered motor for $2.50 at American Science and Surplus to create the STOP/YEILD sign. I used a light metal pole and had created a base out of scrap wood (hence being covered by the leftover greeen fabric). The sign rotated about once a minute. It was the first instance that anyone at the food shows had even used motion in their booths. Before this, we had never even had anyone say anything nice about our booth. After I got finished with it, we won first place and a free booth at the next show.

This was the second instance where I helped out. The theme was baseball (obviously). I had baseball jerseys printed up for each of the sales people. I got some chainlink fence scrap from the fence builder next door to Country Maid and created a backstop. I made a catcher out of foam core and attached a spinning baseball to his catchers mitt (using the same motor from the previous food show.) Finally, and what ultimately won us the booth contest again, I created baseball cards that featured our salads and pertinant information about them. They were the talk of the show. Again, we won first place and a free booth.

I only have one picture of the Schultz show that year. The theme was "Casino" so I made some huge (each two feet across) casino dice that were ultimately hung from the rafters by fishing line with a banner that ran between them reading, "Let the Good Times Roll with Country Maid!" I turned one of the salad bar sneeze guards into a giant slot machine by putting that same battery powered motor inside a foam core shell and putting some salad graphics on a piece of rotating PVC tubing. More PVC created the arms with foam balls for the ends. Real chips and dice were thrown amongst the ice in the salad bars. The next three images are of the "Rock & Roll" themed food show the next year. I don't have any photos, so I can only show the concepts. But as I thought they were just genius (Jim helped, of course) I didn't want to leave them out. Each of these were created on full sheets of foam core and displayed with hanging records with custom labels and a cheap electric guitar frame with Country Maid graphics on it.
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