Chongqing- the 13th annual China (Chongqing) Hot Pot Food Culture Festival and Hot Pot Industry Expo held its grand opening ceremony on October 29. It gathered over 1000 related enterprises for the three-day event to improve the industrial chain further and promote an open road towards high-quality development.

The festival has become an important platform and window for promoting Chongqing's hot pot culture and brands, building on experience accumulated over the past 12 editions of the event.

Zhang Yongwu, party secretary and director of the Chongqing Municipal Commission of Commerce, stated that there are presently 16,600 employees in Chongqing and nearly 30,000 restaurants engaged in the industry, with annual revenue of approximately 60 billion yuan.

As a whole, the hotpot industry chain has attained the 100 billion yuan level, employing 600,000 people working in over 150,000 restaurants nationwide.

Largest ever festival drives industrial chain

This edition of the Chongqing Hot Pot Festival is the largest in scale to date with an exhibition area of 70000 square meters, where over 1000 exhibitors from the industry chain nationwide are displaying more than 20,000 products, including upstream agricultural and husbandry suppliers, midstream base condiment producers, spices, drinks, and equipment, as well as downstream hot pot enterprises, and retail derivatives, cultural innovation, and support services.

Twelve professional exhibitions and exchange activities have been organized for the three-day festival, including the 2021 China Hot Pot Industry Innovation Conference, China Hot Pot Supply Chain Development Forum, the 2021 Chengdu Chongqing Food and Beverage Integrated Development Summit Forum, and the Chongqing Hot Pot Inheritors' Competition.

This series of themed events have gathered industry experts and celebrities to add broad appeal to the festival, explore the limitless potential for development, offer greater play to the advantages that big-name enterprises possess in experience, and drive common development of the industrial chain both up and downstream.

Festival draws on 8D urban characteristics

To reflect the spicy reputation of Chongqing as the 'Hot Pot Capital of China,' an outdoor exhibition area covering 15,000 square meters named the Chongqing Hot Pot City has been set up. This area has recreated the urban characteristics of the city so that visitors can immerse themselves amidst the magical 8D cityscape of old streets and hillside alleyways, urban graffiti, roads, bridges, and monorail tracks.

A unique feature of this year's Chongqing Hot Pot Festival is the 10,000 capacity guest banquet featuring over thirty famous Chongqing brands: Sister Pei, Liu Yishou, Qinma, Brother Zhou, Paoding Haoyu, Zhu Guangyu, Chongqing Cygnet, and Dezhuang Hot Pot.

A total of 56 people sat around a 10-meter-diameter hot pot and enjoyed the spicy food, which became a unique feature of the hot pot festival.

Additionally, the festival has adopted an online + offline model for the first time thanks to the launch of a cloud exhibition, where citizens can check out the latest news releases, exhibits, and live broadcasts.

This breakthrough overcomes physical space limitations and provides an intelligent experience for global audiences to appreciate the charms of the 8D hot pot capital.