Is a large exhibition a sensible place to find new suppliers at all?

It is an efficient place to build a shortlist and a poor place to conclude anything. In two days a buyer can put questions to more candidate suppliers than a quarter of correspondence would reach, hear how each of them talks about its own process, and see which ones send technical staff rather than only sales staff. What a stand cannot do is verify anything. Treat the event as a filter that produces a ranked list of candidates, each with an owner and a next action, and the time spent pays for itself.

What should be prepared before travelling?

A written brief for each material you are there to discuss: the identifier, the grade, the annual quantity, the packaging, the destination, the documentation you will need, and the three questions whose answers would rule a candidate out. Take the shortlist of stands you intend to reach and book the meetings in advance, because the people worth meeting are booked out by the opening morning. Anything not written down before departure will not be asked consistently, and inconsistent questions cannot be compared afterwards.

What questions separate a serious candidate from a polished one?

Specific ones that require a specific answer. Which site makes it, and is that site theirs. Which process route, and what does that route leave in the product. Who issues the certificate of analysis and under whose name. What is the batch size and how are batches numbered. What happens to a lot that fails, and who decides. What change notification will you receive if the route, the site or a raw material changes. A candidate who answers these plainly, including where the answer is unflattering, is worth more than one with better printing.

How should notes be kept so that they survive the trip home?

Write them at the stand or immediately after, on one sheet per company, against the same headings every time, and photograph any sample label together with the sheet so that the two cannot be separated later. Record who you spoke to, their role and how to reach them directly. Names blur within hours at an event of this size, and a business card in a pile with no note attached is worth nothing at all. Consistent headings matter more than length, because they are what make candidates comparable.

What is the right follow-up rhythm afterwards?

Send a written summary of what you understood to each candidate within a few days, while both sides still remember the conversation, and ask them to correct anything you got wrong. That single message does three jobs: it turns a conversation into a record, it tests whether the company answers promptly when nobody is watching, and it puts your requirement in writing for the technical people who were not at the stand. Then run the normal qualification sequence. Nothing at the event replaces it.

A buyer’s method for a large chemical exhibition

Company news · Eapearl Chemical · 18 September 2026

A large chemical exhibition compresses a year of supplier correspondence into two or three days. It is an excellent instrument for building a shortlist and a bad one for reaching conclusions, and most of the value is decided before anyone gets on a plane.

Decide what the trip is for

Exhibitions serve several different purposes and they are not compatible with one another in the same schedule. Sourcing a specific material against a specific requirement, scanning a category you do not yet buy, meeting existing suppliers face to face, and watching what competitors are promoting are four separate jobs. A schedule that tries to do all four does none of them, and the visitor comes home with a bag of literature and no decisions.

Pick one purpose as primary and write it down. If the purpose is sourcing, the output of the trip should be a ranked shortlist in which every entry has an owner, a next action and a date. Anything else is an anecdote.

The brief that makes the questions comparable

For each material you intend to discuss, write a one-page brief before departure and carry it. It should state the identifier rather than only the name, because a stand conversation conducted in a second language around an abbreviation is exactly where substitutions begin. It should state the grade, the quantity over a year, the packaging, the destination market, and the documentation the destination requires. It should end with the three questions whose wrong answer rules the candidate out immediately.

The brief has a second function beyond keeping you organised. Asking every candidate the same questions in the same order is the only way to produce answers that can be compared once you are home. Questions improvised at each stand produce six conversations that cannot be laid side by side.

What a stand can establish, and what it cannot

Can establish: whether the company has technical depth on the floor or only sales presence; whether it answers a specific question specifically; whether it distinguishes its own production from its trading activity without being pushed; how it talks about a failure; who your counterpart would actually be.
Can establish: whether the range on offer is coherent — a house that makes a family of related materials usually talks about them as a family, with reasons for the boundaries of its range.
Cannot establish: quality. A stand sample is a sample, presented under ideal conditions, and it tells you nothing about the consistency of routine production.
Cannot establish: capacity, lead time or price with any reliability, because every one of those is quoted optimistically in a hall full of competitors.
Cannot establish: compliance status for your market. That is a documentary matter and it is settled by documents, at the office, afterwards.

Questions that require a specific answer

Which site makes this material, and is that site yours? Ask for the address, not the region.
Which process route? The route determines the impurity profile, and a candidate that cannot describe its own route is describing someone else’s product.
Who issues the certificate of analysis, in whose name, and from which laboratory?
What is a normal batch size, and how are batches numbered and traced?
What happens when a batch fails specification, and who has authority to release or reject?
Will I be notified if the route, the site, a key raw material or the specification changes, and in what form?
What do you not make, and what would you buy in to complete an order? The answer to that question is more informative than any of the others.

The test is not whether the answers are impressive. It is whether they are specific, consistent between two people on the same stand, and unembarrassed about limits. A supplier who says plainly that a particular grade is bought in rather than made is telling you something useful; one who implies that everything in the catalogue comes from one reactor is telling you something too.

Recording, so that the trip survives the journey home

Use one sheet per company, with the same headings every time: company, site claimed, counterpart and role, direct contact, materials discussed, answers to the standing questions, samples taken, literature taken, next action, owner, date. Fill it in at the stand or immediately after, never that evening and never on the flight. At an event of this size the conversations blur within hours, and a card with no note attached is indistinguishable from a card picked up by accident.

Photograph every sample beside its sheet. A sample bottle whose label has rubbed off, or whose label says only a product name, is not evidence of anything and cannot be entered into a qualification file. Note who handed it to you and what they said it was, because that statement is part of the sample.

Samples, literature and the awkward practicalities

Samples collected at an event travel under rules that apply to the material and not to the occasion. Small quantities of solvents, acids and other regulated goods cannot simply be carried in hand luggage, and a courier shipment needs the correct documentation and classification regardless of how small it is. The workable approach is to agree at the stand that a properly documented sample will be shipped to your site, and to treat anything handed over on the day as illustrative only. That also solves the quantity problem, since a meaningful laboratory trial needs more material than anyone carries around a hall.

Printed literature is worth keeping only when it carries identifiers and specification detail. A brochure that names a commodity such as acetone or ethyl acetate without stating grade, packaging or impurity panel adds nothing to a file. Ask instead for the specification sheet and a representative certificate of analysis, and ask for them by email so that they arrive with a traceable date.

The week after

Write to each shortlisted candidate within a few days with your own summary of what you understood, and invite correction. This is the highest-value hour of the whole exercise. It converts a conversation into a record, it puts the requirement in front of technical staff who were not on the stand, and the speed and quality of the reply is itself a data point about how the company behaves when there is no exhibition hall around it.

Then start the ordinary qualification sequence: documents, samples against a written specification, a laboratory trial, a plant trial, and only then a first commercial lot. The exhibition shortened the search. It did not shorten the verification, and a shortlist treated as an approval is the single most expensive mistake available at an event like this. If a shortlist from a recent event needs turning into specifications and documented samples, our contact page is the place to start that conversation.