The upcoming Seafood Expo Global (SEG) scheduled for April 26 - 28 at the Fira de Barcelona’s Gran Via exhibition grounds in Barcelona, Spain, currently has just over 1,500 exhibitors committed, roughly 80 percent of the 1,900 companies that exhibited at the 2019 SEG in Brussels, Belgium.
The 2020 and 2021 SEG trade shows were canceled because of COVID.
Diversified Communications, owners of SEG and Seafood Expo North America (SENA) announced at a press conference Thursday in Barcelona that the event will include exhibits from 76 countries, according to the company’s media arm SeafoodSource.
The upcoming event, according to the report, will feature an estimated 39,545 square meters of net exhibit space, equating to 97 percent of the size of the 2019 event, which was the largest-ever edition of the trade show.
The show organizers said they are expecting a reduced presence from China and Ukraine, and the absence of exhibitors from Russia and Belarus.
The event was originally scheduled to move from Brussels, where it had been held for 27 years, to Barcelona in 2020, but those plans were dashed by the emergence of the global COVID pandemic.
Diversified Communications hosted its SENA show in Boston in mid-March.
Leading up to the show, many high-profile seafood companies – including Peter Pan Seafood, MultiX, Beaver Street Fisheries, High Liner Foods, Mowi and Cermaq -- pulled out of exhibiting at the event because of safety concerns related to COVID.
The show ended up with roughly 754 exhibitors, significantly lower than the 1,329 exhibitors the company said attended the trade event in 2019.
