Issue 38 CHAMPS Show Magazine October 2022

Daytona Details

By Amear Moretall Hallowen

By Spook E.

By Nick Gaulin

Trade Shows

By Amear Moretall

CHAMPS on the Beach

CHAMPS has moved its unique brand of the show to the World's Most Famous Beach, Daytona Beach, Florida. In the last issue of CHAMPS Magazine, we let you know a bit about it. Now for a complete and exciting detailed version about some of the most exciting new things they are doing.

Let's start with a 100,000 Square foot Exhibit hall teaming with all the best brands. Kratomade, DripDrop, Cake, and many more will be on hand. As always, they will be ready to make all the Buyers Happy.

Buyers, this will be the last chance to get the best end-of-the-year sales to fill your store for holiday buyers. Every year smart companies make sure you know they don't want to hold onto inventory for next year.

CHAMPS has another significant change, the largest selection of American Made glass of the year. In its own 40,000 SqFt Arena across the Hall from the Main CHAMPS Exhibit hall.

Set Up Day: October 31st, 8 am8 pm. The Ocean Center hall is open for Vendor set-up.

Halloween Party Location to be announced later.

Glass Bash is a new exciting event for the Glass Art community. The CHAMPS Glass Games crew will bring everything and the kitchen sink to this event. With the ability to have over 50 glass blowers working simultaneously. A substantial amount of collaborative art stations will be ready for the artist to work together.

Day one and two: The Glass Bash Doors open at 10 am to ALL registered CHAMPS Buyers Only.

The glass blowers will all be in their booths from 10 am - 12 noon for "The Big Drop." This will be the best time to meet the artists and buy their art.

The impressive list of artists grows every day. From your daily production sales to the headiest of headdies, this will be the selection to choose from. Glass artists from all over the country will be coming to throwdown in CHAMPS's first Glass Bash.

Starting at Noon, all the Glass Blowing stations will come alive with action. Solo artists' collaborative art stations, demos, and more.

Lost Boys Glass Studio is preparing its largest collab by assembling a reef piece including elements from as many artists that attend.

CHAMPS on the Beach Trade Shows

The CHAMPS Glass Games Team will have a Collaborative art station so they can do collabs themselves with contestants from this year's competitions.

A full schedule of Demo Artists will show off special techniques to all attendees for free.

Both Buyers and Vendors can blow glass during the festivities with the newest part of the show: Blow with a Pro.

All they have to do is Pay the $420 Charity fee, and they can work for 3 hours with someone like RAM, Kristian Merwin, Sakibomb, and more to be named later.

While all this fun is happening, a steady stream of DJs will fill the room with tunes.

On Day 3, the Glass Bash will go from a glass-blowing extravaganza to Charity auctions and the GLASS BASH.

The Actual "Glass Bash" is a fun new Glass event. Artists will build glass RC cars to demolish in a head-on collision with another artist's RC car. This will begin at 12 Noon.

Phil Siegel, Banjo, Punty

Source: Glass Culture Magazine Issue 1 - Phoebe Guenzel

Terry Sharp

Glass car from summer games

Habitat Glass from Summer Games

The competition will start with a forward-facing round followed by a reverse-facing round. The car with the highest percentage of glass left wins.

Interesting Displays to look for on the show floor?

Ode to Florida History: Featuring Pieces from the 1994 Dark Star Glass Catalog, Dark Star was the first Florida Wholesaler of Color Changing Glass as well as the first known in the country.

The Glass art Scene in Print, as seen through the Magazines that tirelessly covered the scene to document in a traditional physical form, the Glass Art Industry. TheFlow, Glass Aficianado, HotBreath, Glass Culture. We will have an interactive area to look at individual Issues.

CHAMPS Afterhours

Daytona Beach is loaded with after-hours entertainment. There is something for everyone, from the nightclub scene to the oceanside outdoor bars.

If good food and drinks within walking distance are your things, the Official Restaurant of the Glass Bash is a Key West legend that found a home in Daytona. Sloppy Joe's! The Key West location is known for its famed drunken patron, Ernest Hemingway, among many other notable artists of the time.

Ironically the Sloppy Joe Sandwich had nothing to do with how Sloppy Joe's got its name or vice versa. But let me tell you something, I stopped in for a Sloppy the other day. Damn, that was good! With Ocean views and live entertain ment, the place oozes Florida beach fun.

No matter when you go while you are here, be sure to bring your show badge to get a special deal on your meal. Tuesday night, they will be hosting our CHAMPS Industry night Dinner. Similar to our Kelseys Dinner in Atlantic City, this will be a great time to have great food and fun.

Be on the lookout Wednesday night for another great networking event brought to you by some of our show vendors and sponsors. They have not narrowed in on a place yet, but It will surely be an epic event packed with great people and networking opportunities.

CHAMPS on the Beach Trade Shows

CHAMPS is super excited to finish the year at the beach. So get your sandals out and book your room at the Hilton with Beautiful Ocean views and your flight to the most exciting new CHAMPS event. Daytona Beach, Florida, November 1-3rd,

Photo by Dominik Mecko on Unsplash

Hilton Daytona Beach Oceanfront Resort

The new world created from the ruins of the world we lost is much different from the usual. Neighborhoods are no longer a thing; it was too dangerous and hard to protect. Instead, many cities are rebuilding within the remaining condo buildings, skyrises, sports venues, and hotels.

These places are built to house many people and can be protected quickly and efficiently. They provide a certain amount of safety inside them that the classic neighborhood doesn’t. Those that say there is power in numbers are correct in this new world.

These communities often follow older traditions to help support each other. Barter is the primary source of economy, home crafts, produce, and foodstuff is always at the market. Community patrols keep the buildings safe for all the inhabitants. That is, as long as they stay within the structure. Halloween

By Spook E.

Illustrations by SEAN DIETRICH

Hotel Halloween

If you haven’t tried the insectriant bars you are lucky. They taste like overcooked treebark that was BBQ’e in a hot bog.

They grind down the ever-increasing bug population into a protein supplement bar. It’s like a mammal-free diet meat bar.

Vegan and vegetarian diets no longer exist; you eat fish, mammal meat, or bugs. In the larger, more populated areas, vegetables are not always available to sustain life on a diet of just that. But, everywhere you go… bugs, a full buffet of different-tasting proteins. Proper cleaning, cooking, and spicing are essential to the daily diet.

This October 31st was the first Halloween the crew would be within the confines of a large living complex bustling with life inside.

Trick or Treat? Treats are often tricks, and jokes are exchanged for laughs and amazements. Each time you knock on a door, your heart beats faster, awaiting what will answer the door.

Hotel Halloween

The Buzz Behind the Fruiting Mycology Industry

Walking around the counterculture scene as of late, you may have noticed an explosion of interest in mycology and products surrounding the production of mushrooms. Before we take a look at where the industry is, we should start out with where the industry originally began.

Since pre-historic times, humans have both grown and gathered mushrooms for a variety of reasons, chief among them being food and medicine. However, in the book Food of the Gods, American ethnobotanist Terence McKenna argues that mycology played a far greater role in who we are as a species. According to McKenna, the first evolutionary step we took in moving from Homo Erectus to Homo Sapiens, was consuming a form of psilocybe cubensis, a psychedelic fungus, while tracking herds of roaming cattle.

By Nick Gaulin

Terence McKenna during a panel discussion at the 1999 AllChemical Arts Conference, held at Kona, Hawaii

Attribution: Jon Hanna - Wikimedia Commons

Since those early days of foraging, mycology as an industry has primarily focused on the production and procurement of gourmet and wellness mushrooms. In October of 2021, Smallhold, an organic specialty gourmet mushroom provider, closed a first investment round of $25 million USD. This success highlighted a simple fact, investors and capital were flowing into the market in anticipation of continued consumer growth. The ‘Shroom Boom’, as it’s since been coined, has now begun penetration into the general wellness market and captured psychedelics as cities decrimi nalize and states legalize. In particular, the psychedelic portion of the mycology industry, which is poised to become the next ‘green rush market’ after cannabis, has raised well over $220 million of investment capital in 2020 alone and already has companies listed on the Canadian NEO and US Nasdaq exchanges.

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Food of the Gods (Terence McKenna, 1993)

“Even as the nineteenth century had to come to grips with the notion of human descent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that those apes were stoned apes.”

Shum debuted their all-in-one spawn bag product during CHAMPS Summer 2022

Attribution: CHAMPS Smoke Shop Report

The Buzz Behind the Fruiting Mycology Industry

End consumer market products aren’t the only part of the industry that’s seeing incredible growth. Since there is no legal market currently for psychoactive therapeutic products, the majority of the market on the retail side has been for the picks and shovels helping to support these emerging brands. Companies doing research and development using wellness mushrooms such as Reishi, Yellow Morel, and Lions Mane in place of their psychedelic cousins, seems to be a current trend.

At home mycology enthusiasts are also worth noting as e-commerce and brick and mortar retailers continue to scale their offerings, they have also been requested to carry items such as spawn bags, monotubs, micropore, and substrate to complement their cannabis accessories line. With the global mushroom market expected to hit an astounding $86 billion USD value by 2025, there has been no better time to dip your toes into the “mushroom madness” by stocking some of these basic high-margin items for your store.

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A mycology themed art car at Burning Man 2022 in Black Rock, NV.

Attribution: CHAMPS Smoke Shop Report

The Buzz Behind the Fruiting Mycology Industry

CHAMPS Trade Shows, as the leader for business-to-business networking in counterculture since 1999, recognized that mycology was going to be the next breakout star on the counterculture scene by helping set the stage for the emerging industry to fruit new opportunities for both retailers and brands alike. By creating the CHAMPS Mycology department, CHAMPS has pioneered networking between myco brands and retailers on a mass scale, thus accelerating the industry for the next chapter in counterculture.

At CHAMPS Summer Show in July of 2022, we welcomed brands such as Shrum, Myco Alchemy, Coast 2 Coast Mycology, Spores N’ More, & AstroLabs Institute as part of the first-ever business-to-business show

Detroit Michigan based Spores N’ More brought out a full line of consumer ready products to allow myco enthusiasts to grow at home.

Attribution: CHAMPS Smoke Shop Report

The Buzz Behind the Fruiting Mycology Industry

dedicated to helping build the industry of mycology. Everything from the substrate to spawn and genetics to fully branded end consumer product goods (wellness mushrooms of course) were on full display for retailers to pick from.

Nick G., Co-Founder & CEO of AstroLabs Institute, stated he had never experienced anything quite like it. “The show floor was incredible. What surprised me however was that CHAMPS retail buyers were incredibly interested not only in the product itself, but where the industry was headed in the next couple of years. The conversations I had were not only profitable from a business perspective but were encouraging from an intellectual perspective.” He continued with his thoughts about the future of the industry.” Mycology has finally arrived on the scene and CHAMPS was the first to champion that from a business-tobusiness perspective. This industry is here to stay.”

Myco Alchemy was o ering everything from end consumer products to the picks and shovels at CHAMPS Summer 2022

Attribution: CHAMPS Smoke Shop Report

The Buzz Behind the Fruiting Mycology Industry

In order to help continue to facilitate the growth of the industry across the United States, CHAMPS Trade Shows will be including mycology brands not only supplying both the picks and shovels of the industry, but also the end consumer products at every show moving forward. To get more information about CHAMPS Mycology or to display your mycology brand at a future CHAMPS Trade Show, please contact Hap Kent, CHAMPS Mycology Concierge, via email

Hap@CHAMPSTradeShows.com or by phone at 818-616-7411

Coast to Coast Mycology discusses business opportunities at CHAMPS Summer 2022

Attribution: CHAMPS Smoke Shop Report