By ROOT Marketing and PR
By the time a natural products brand reaches “midrange”, the fundamentals are solid. You’ve earned distribution, refined your positioning, weathered operational curveballs, and learned—sometimes the hard way—how to spend your marketing dollars carefully. You don’t chase shiny objects. You make deliberate choices.
That’s exactly why trade shows like Expo West, Newtopia Now, FNCE, and others should still be an important part of your growth plan.
At ROOT, we love working with brands at this point in their growth. Many of our clients—brands like Bubbies and wildbrine—are established category leaders with years of momentum behind them. They didn’t get there by doing everything. They got there by doing the right things, consistently, and by using events strategically as part of a broader relationship- and reputation-building plan.
Trade shows aren’t about proving legitimacy anymore—you’ve already done that. They’re about protecting momentum, strengthening leverage, and making sure your brand stays top of mind with the people who shape your next chapter.
The strategic value of events at this stage
For established brands, events function differently than they do for startups or emerging challengers. The value isn’t novelty or discovery; it’s concentration. In a few days, you can have high-context conversations that would otherwise take months of emails, intros, and scheduling to replicate.
That concentration shows up in subtle but meaningful ways: a buyer who finally has time to talk through a reset; a distributor who’s ready to expand your footprint; a journalist who’s been watching your category and wants your perspective; a peer brand whose challenges mirror yours and sparks a useful partnership.
What matters most is that events give you the opportunity to show up as a known quantity—a brand with staying power, clear values, and a long-term view. That’s a very different posture than “look at us, we’re new,” and it’s one that resonates with retailers, media, and partners alike.
Networking, without the theater
At this level, most brand leaders are allergic to performative networking. You don’t need to work the room aggressively or collect contacts for the sake of it. The strongest relationships tend to form through grounded, generous conversations that aren’t rushed.
The most effective approach we see is surprisingly simple: show up prepared to be useful. Not in a transactional way, but in a grounded, industry-citizen way. Making thoughtful introductions. Sharing perspective when asked. Listening more than talking. Recognizing that not every conversation needs to turn into something immediately.
A quick but important operational detail: capture context while it’s fresh. A sentence or two in your phone after a conversation—what you talked about, why it mattered, what you offered—makes follow-up far more meaningful. And timely follow-up (a few days, not weeks, later) is still one of the easiest ways to stand out, even among sophisticated brands.
Choosing events with intention
By this stage, the question isn’t “Should we be at events?” It’s “Which ones actually deserve our time?”
Natural Products Expo West remains a cornerstone. It’s big, expensive, and can be exhausting—but it’s also still the single most efficient place to maintain and advance key relationships across retail, distribution, media, and the broader ecosystem. Smart brands get more value from Expo West by attending thoughtfully—pre-booked meetings, targeted events, smaller hosted moments—than by defaulting to a massive booth presence.
Newtopia Now has effectively replaced Expo East and fills a different role. It’s more curated, more intimate, more forward-looking, and often better suited for brands thinking about innovation, positioning, and what’s next, rather than sheer scale. For many established brands, it’s a place to have better conversations, not just more of them.
For food brands with a specialty or premium angle, the Fancy Food Shows—now split into Winter Fancy Food Show and Summer Fancy Food Show—continue to be valuable, especially for maintaining visibility with specialty retail, buyers looking for differentiated products, and media covering food culture more broadly.
FNCE (the Food & Nutrition Conference & Expo) is worth considering for brands operating at the intersection of nutrition, functional food, and science-backed wellness. It’s a very different audience—dietitians, nutrition professionals, educators—but for the right brands, it can be a powerful credibility-builder and a way to influence how products are recommended and discussed beyond retail shelves.
SupplySide East and West remain important for supplement, functional, and ingredient-driven brands, particularly those thinking about formulation, sourcing, or B2B partnerships alongside consumer-facing growth.
Should you exhibit or just attend?
This is one of the most important strategic decisions—and one that deserves to be revisited regularly.
Exhibiting can make sense when you’re launching something significant, when discovery is a clear goal, or when your retail strategy depends on high-volume sampling and visibility. It can also be useful as a signaling tool, reinforcing scale and commitment in a competitive category.
Attending without a booth is often the smarter move when your goals are relational rather than transactional. If your calendar is full of meetings, if your buyers already know you, or if you’re prioritizing media, partnerships, or strategy conversations, exhibiting can actually dilute your impact by tying you to a booth instead of letting you be mobile and intentional.
Many midrange brands alternate year to year, or exhibit selectively at one major show while attending others more lightly. The key is aligning the format with the outcome you actually want.
You know this better than anyone: brands don’t reach this stage by accident. The same discipline that got you here—thoughtful spending, long-term thinking, strong relationships—is what makes trade shows valuable when they’re used well.
When events are treated not as marketing obligations but as strategic touchpoints, they become one of the most efficient tools available for protecting momentum and shaping what comes next.
At ROOT, we bring more than two decades of experience attending—and representing clients at—industry events like Expo West. We help established natural products brands approach events the same way they built their businesses: thoughtfully, strategically, and with a long-term view. If you’re thinking about how events fit into your broader PR, partnerships, and growth strategy, we’d love to talk.
