Case Study

Afresh · Groceryshop 2024

Every algorithm at Groceryshop claimed to know fresh food. One booth looked like it.

Afresh’s Fresh Operating System™ helps grocers cut waste and run fresher departments with AI — software with produce at its heart. For Groceryshop 2024 at Mandalay Bay, Pure Exhibits built a 20 × 30 island that made the category visible from any aisle: a precise two-green architecture, monumental data-story columns wrapped in blueberries and citrus, and warm wood against the machine talk of 500-plus exhibitors.

Afresh 20x30 island exhibit at Groceryshop 2024 with lime and forest green architecture at Mandalay Bay Convention Center, Las Vegas
20 × 30
Custom Island Exhibit
Mandalay Bay
Las Vegas, Nevada
October 7–9, 2024
Aisle A 400s/500s
500+
Booth Visitors Across Three Days

Software that smells like produce

Groceryshop 2024 gathered 5,000+ grocery professionals at Mandalay Bay to see the technology reshaping how America buys food — and put Afresh on a floor with Algolia, SymphonyAI, Fetch, ibotta, Upside, Aperion by Hussmann, Phononic and Upshop, names with bigger budgets and long-standing retail relationships. Every one of them was selling intelligence. Afresh’s intelligence happens to live in the most tactile department of the store: fresh food, where waste is measured in pallets and margin in days.

That was the opening. Rather than compete on abstraction — dashboards, models, integrations — the booth needed to make the Fresh Operating System™ feel like what it manages: produce, freshness, and the discipline of keeping both. The design bet was that in a hall of screens, the exhibit that looked like the category itself would be the one buyers remembered walking through.

Produce-forward display inside the Afresh island at Groceryshop 2024 translating fresh food AI into physical form

Fresh, engineered

Two-green architecture of the Afresh island with lime structural frame and forest green data panels at Groceryshop 2024
01

The Two-Green Grammar

The booth’s most distinctive decision was chromatic precision: bright lime green on the structural frame, columns and edges — freshness, nature, energy — and deep forest green grounding the data panels — authority, stability, trust. One brand, two registers, legible from any aisle approach, and unmistakable in a hall where every other tech vendor defaulted to blue.

02

Columns That Argue

Two monumental freestanding columns worked as data-storytelling surfaces built to land at walking speed: vivid produce photography — blueberries, asparagus, oranges, citrus — layered with customer results and testimonial quotes in large type, including marquee grocers. Proof and appetite on the same surface, readable in seconds.

03

Wood Under the Data

Warm wood-slat surfaces ran through the build, giving the software company the material language of a well-run market rather than a server room. The pairing did the positioning silently: technology, yes — but technology in service of food.

Demo displays running the Fresh Operating System inside the Afresh island at Groceryshop 2024
04

Zones That Sequence the Visit

The 20 × 30 was organized as a multi-zone environment — open demo edges where the Fresh Operating System™ ran on screens against forest-green fields, flowing into space where a produce buyer could have the second, quieter conversation. The layout turned a walk-past into a walkthrough.

05

Recognizable at Aisle Range

Against 500+ exhibitors, identity had to work at distance. The two-green palette carried across every surface meant Afresh was identifiable before its name was legible — the rarest kind of brand equity a show floor can produce.

06

Built Before It Shipped

The island was fabricated, fully stood up and photo-approved at our facility before shipping to Las Vegas, on one fixed price — so the only surprises at Mandalay Bay were the ones the sales team engineered on purpose.

The build at a glance

20 × 30
Custom Island — 600 sq ft, Aisle A 400s/500s
500+
Booth Visitors Across Three Show Days
5,000+
Grocery Professionals at Groceryshop 2024
2
Greens in the Signature Palette — Lime Structure, Forest Data
Groceryshop 2024 · Mandalay Bay
Grocery’s definitive technology event, 500+ exhibitors

The category, made physical

The build succeeded by refusing the default: no blue, no abstraction, no dashboard-first storytelling. Produce photography did the stopping, the two-green architecture did the identifying, the data columns did the convincing, and the wood kept the whole thing human. Five hundred booth visitors across three days is what it looks like when a software company exhibits as its category instead of its interface.

For a different retail-floor answer from the same portfolio, see BASE at Shoptalk 2025 — and for software-with-nothing-to-touch solved in security’s register, Appdome at RSA 2026.

Selling software to a hands-on industry?

The booths that win at retail and grocery shows look like the category, not the codebase. Pure Exhibits designs and fabricates custom islands that translate platforms into physical experience — pre-built, photo-approved, one fixed price.