Breakbulk Europe, the trade show for project cargo, counted more than 12,800 attendees and over 740 exhibitors in 2026. Among them were just over 640 shippers, the cargo owners whose freight everyone else in the hall wants to move (Breakbulk Europe, 2026 event figures). That is about one attendee in twenty.
Most supply chain and logistics events look like this. Carriers, freight forwarders, warehouse operators and software vendors arrive in large numbers and pay for stands. The companies that own the freight are few, busy and hard to reach. Leave their diaries to chance, and a handful of well-known shippers are mobbed while the rest go home early.
This guide is for organisers of logistics conferences, trade shows and summits who want to add booked one-to-one meetings between shippers and service providers. Shipper time is the scarce resource of your event, so the meeting programme has to ration it by rule: who counts as a shipper, who may request whom, and what a hosted shipper owes in return.
Why shipper time is the scarce resource
The one-in-twenty ratio is not peculiar to project cargo. Where organisers publish both figures, the buying side is the minority, even at an event that advertises its shippers.
The buying side is the minority at logistics events
For providers, a meeting with a shipper is worth more than the ratio alone suggests. In the 2026 Third-Party Logistics Study, a little over half of all shippers said they do not rebid business at the end of contracts (Penske Logistics, press release on the study by Dr C. John Langley and NTT DATA, 7 October 2025). A third-party logistics provider (3PL) that waits for a tender may wait for years. The conversation has to happen before the contract is renewed, and a conference is one of the few places where it can.
Now look at it from the other chair. Picture the head of logistics at a mid-sized furniture manufacturer. She ships by road across Europe and by sea from Asia, and forty providers at your event would like half an hour with her. She has two days. Whether she comes at all depends on one question: will she spend those days with providers she chose, or being found by everyone else?
Shipper time is the product you ration.
Decide who counts as a shipper
Rationing starts with a definition, and logistics makes that harder than most industries. A freight forwarder sells to shippers and buys from carriers. A retailer with its own lorries is a shipper in one meeting and a carrier in the next.
Organisers who host shippers therefore write the definition down. Manifest, a supply chain event in Las Vegas, admits to its hosted shipper programme only shippers who make or influence buying decisions on supply chain technology and services. It names the industries that qualify, from retail to pharmaceuticals, and states that logistics solution providers and freight forwarders are not eligible (Manifest, Hosted Shipper Program page for the 2027 edition, accessed November 2026). Breakbulk aims its shipper programme at senior cargo owners in named sectors such as energy, mining, chemicals and manufacturing (Breakbulk, Global Shipper Programme page, accessed November 2026).
Three rules keep such a definition workable:
- Classify by what a company does at your event, not by its industry. Whoever comes to buy transport, warehousing or software belongs to the buying side.
- Give each company one role per event. A forwarder that wants to sell to shippers and buy from carriers chooses the side that matters more, or registers two people in two groups.
- Check the person as well as the company. Ask for job function and buying responsibility at registration, and approve the profile before you confirm the place.
One company, one role, one badge.
Who may request whom: the meeting matrix
Once every participant sits in a group, you can decide which groups may meet. Without that decision, an open request function produces exactly the result you wanted to avoid. Three weeks before the event, our head of logistics opens her inbox and finds sixty meeting requests, most of them from providers she will never use. She ignores them and stops logging in.
A meeting matrix sets the directions in advance. The table shows typical rules for a mixed logistics event.
| Group | May send requests to | Receives requests from |
|---|---|---|
| Shippers and cargo owners | Every provider group | Nobody directly: providers can only signal interest |
| Freight forwarders and 3PLs | Carriers, ports, technology vendors | Carriers, ports, technology vendors, shippers |
| Carriers, ports and terminals | Forwarders and 3PLs | Forwarders and 3PLs, shippers |
| Technology and equipment vendors | Forwarders, 3PLs and carriers | Shippers, forwarders, 3PLs and carriers |
The principle behind the table is that shippers choose first. Open the request window for shippers a week before everyone else. Providers then mark the shippers they would like to meet, and each shipper sees that list as a suggestion, not as a queue to answer. Manifest follows the same logic with a double opt-in: a hosted meeting is booked only when both the shipper and the sponsor agree (Manifest, Hosted Shipper Program page).
Caps do the rest. A sales team that may flag only ten shippers has to think about fit first. Why participant groups need different rights at all is one of the mistakes we describe in who should meet whom. How many providers you can admit per shipper is a matter of arithmetic, which we work through in our guide to the buyer-to-seller ratio.
The matrix is your rationing rule.
Profiles that let a shipper choose in two minutes
Choosing first only helps if the shipper can tell forty providers apart. Profiles that promise global end-to-end solutions all read the same. Ask both sides for the fields that logistics buyers actually filter by:
- Modes: road, rail, sea, air, parcel or warehousing only.
- Lanes and regions: where the freight starts and ends, or where the provider runs its own network.
- Freight type: containers, pallets, bulk, temperature-controlled, hazardous or oversized cargo.
- Outsourced today: transport, warehousing, customs, the whole operation or nothing yet.
- Current project: a new warehouse, a new lane, a system change or a provider review.
- Timing: when the next contract or budget decision is due.
Timing is the field providers value most and shippers share least. Offer broad ranges and tell shippers who will see the answer. With these six fields, a shipper who moves chilled food from Spain to Poland finds the five providers with their own network on that lane, not forty logos. Which questions belong on the registration form, and which can wait, is covered in our article on registration questions for matchmaking.
Three ways to host shippers, and what each asks in return
A good profile gets the shipper to accept a meeting. Hosting gets her to the event in the first place. Logistics organisers use three models, and they differ less in generosity than in what they ask back.
| Model | What the shipper gets | What the shipper owes |
|---|---|---|
| Free pass and lounge | Complimentary pass, a shipper lounge, access to the meeting app | Nothing fixed |
| Reimbursement tied to meetings | Free pass plus a travel payment | A minimum number of booked meetings |
| Fully hosted summit | Free place, hotel, meals and a personal schedule | A schedule of meetings, usually for the whole event |
Each model has a published example. Breakbulk gives qualifying shippers a complimentary pass, a lounge and full access to the networking app to schedule meetings with providers (Breakbulk, Global Shipper Programme page). Manifest reimburses travel with 750 US dollars for hosted shippers who take at least six pre-scheduled meetings of 15 minutes, and 250 US dollars for joining one roundtable (Manifest, Hosted Shipper Program page for 2027). The Total Supply Chain Summit of Forum Events in the UK gives buyers a complimentary place with overnight accommodation and a personalised schedule of one-to-one meetings, while suppliers receive pre-arranged meetings at a ready-made stand (Logistics Business, event listing, accessed November 2026).
The lesson sits in the middle row. Tie the benefit to meetings held, not to registration. A free pass without a duty fills the lounge, not the diary.
The duty must stay fair, though. Our head of logistics will accept six meetings if she picked the providers herself and the rest of the programme is worth her time. How firm a hosted delegate contract can be, down to cancellation fees, is shown in our guide to hosted buyer summits in B2B tech. How many meetings a day a hosted guest can sensibly take is the subject of how many meetings each hosted buyer should get.
Slot length and the timetable around the meetings
Once the duty is set, the slot length follows from the purpose of the meeting. A first conversation between a shipper and a provider is not a rate negotiation. It decides whether a site visit, a pilot or a tender invitation should follow. Manifest plans 15 minutes for that. If you are weighing other slot lengths, our overview of B2B meetings at events compares the common formats.
Where you put the slots matters as much. Shippers also come for the sessions on customs, capacity and regulation. Schedule meeting blocks against those sessions and your meeting area will sit empty.
A shipper-provider meeting programme in seven steps
- 6 months Write the shipper definition Criteria, hosting model and what a hosted shipper owes fit on one page.
- 5 months Recruit shippers first Invite them personally; providers decide on packages when they see who is coming.
- 8 weeks Approve the profiles Check role and buying responsibility before you confirm a hosted place.
- 5 weeks Open requests for shippers Shippers shortlist providers before any provider can signal interest.
- 4 weeks Open the provider side Providers flag a capped number of shippers; shippers accept or decline.
- Event days Run and record the meetings Every meeting has a slot and a table; free slots go to the next name on the list.
- 2 weeks after Report and reimburse Pay travel benefits for meetings held and send each provider its own figures.
The weeks are working values for a conference with travel, not a rule.
What to report after the event
The last step of the timeline is the one providers judge you by. The sales director of a haulage company does not ask how many people came. He asks how many shippers his team sat down with.
Even at large shows, booked meetings cover only part of the conversations. Breakbulk Europe reported 1,645 meetings booked on its app in 2025, for 11,425 attendees and 577 hosted shippers at the 2025 edition (Breakbulk Europe, 2025 stats brochure). That is roughly one booked meeting for every seven attendees. Many conversations at a show of that size happen at the stands, where nobody counts them. If you sell providers a meeting programme, the count is what they pay for.
Report five figures, per provider and for the event as a whole:
- Meetings held per shipper, against the slots each shipper offered.
- The share of providers with at least one meeting with a shipper.
- No-shows on both sides.
- A short rating of each meeting by both participants.
- Follow-ups after three months, such as site visits or tender invitations.
The fourth figure is the one organisers skip, and the one that sells next year’s packages. DELIVER America, a hosted event for retail logistics, reports that at its last edition retailers and sponsors saw real partnership potential in 58 per cent of the pre-qualified meetings (DELIVER, event website, organiser data, accessed November 2026). The full set of key performance indicators (KPIs) along the funnel is described in our KPI framework for B2B event matchmaking, and our analysis of meeting no-shows shows how to count the third one honestly.
Count meetings held, not passes issued.
Solution: Converve runs such a programme on a rule-based meeting matrix. You define the participant groups, for example shippers, forwarders, carriers and technology vendors, and decide which group may request meetings with which. Quotas per participant keep the popular shippers from being booked out. Participants see each other’s profiles, send and accept requests, and every confirmed meeting lands in a slot with a table number. Because the rules are visible, you can explain each pairing to a provider who asks. More detail is on our B2B matchmaking page.
Conclusion: ration shipper time by rule
A supply chain or logistics conference rarely lacks providers. It lacks hours in the diaries of the people who own the freight. A meeting programme that works treats those hours as the scarce resource. It defines the shipper in writing, lets shippers choose before providers ask, ties hosting benefits to meetings held and reports those meetings to the companies that paid for them. Then the head of logistics has a reason to come back, and so do the forty providers who wanted to meet her.
If you are planning shipper-provider meetings for a logistics event and want to see how groups, rules and quotas can be set up, get in touch with Converve.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a shipper-provider meeting programme?
It is a schedule of pre-booked one-to-one meetings between shippers, meaning companies that own freight, and logistics service providers such as carriers, forwarders and software vendors. The organiser sets who may request whom, and each agreed meeting has a fixed slot and table.
Who counts as a shipper at a logistics conference?
A shipper is a company that buys transport, warehousing or supply chain technology for its own goods, represented by someone who makes or influences that buying decision. Manifest, for example, excludes logistics solution providers and freight forwarders from its hosted shipper programme (Manifest, Hosted Shipper Program page for 2027).
Should shippers attend a logistics conference for free?
Many organisers offer it, because providers pay to meet shippers. It works best when the benefit is tied to meetings held: Manifest reimburses 750 US dollars of travel for at least six hosted meetings (Manifest, Hosted Shipper Program page for 2027).
How long should a meeting between a shipper and a provider be?
A first meeting needs 15 to 20 minutes. Its purpose is to decide whether a site visit, a pilot or a tender invitation should follow, not to negotiate rates. Manifest schedules its hosted meetings as 15-minute one-to-ones with a sponsoring company.
How many shippers do you need for a meeting programme?
There is no minimum. What counts is capacity: the number of shippers multiplied by the meetings each one takes. Sixty shippers who each take six meetings give you 360 slots. Admit only as many providers as those slots can serve.