Elevate Your Dining Room with Cal-Mil

Cal-Mil continues to innovate their design and offers you a chance to evolve your food displays, beverage dispensers, condiment holders, signs, and other tabletop supplies.

When Cal-Mil was first created in 1965, it was a small family-run business manufacturing plastic table top supplies for the foodservice industry. Today, Cal-Mil is still a family business but its dedication to innovation and customer service has allowed the company to grow exponentially. Keeping with modern trends, Cal-Mil now offers a huge variety of catering displays and food merchandisers made of plastic, bamboo, metal, oak, pine, slate, marble, and other materials.

One of our favorite materials Cal-Mil offers is its variety of sleek and modern bamboo display pieces. Bamboo offers a unique aesthetic, but Cal-Mil is offering bamboo as a sustainable alternative to wood. Bamboo is highly sustainable because it is a grass and once harvested, grows back to maturity within 3-5 years. Considering it takes 20-40 years for trees like walnut and oak to reach maturity, many consider bamboo an eco-friendly option to hardwoods. Because of its growth rate, the farming of bamboo typically does not require harmful chemicals like fertilizer, pesticides, or herbicides.  Bamboo is also water resistant and anti-bacterial so there’s no question that it belongs in the food and beverage world.

Cal-Mil bamboo displays range in shape and size so you can complete your display with one cohesive look – which we recommend as far as merchandising your food.   You want your display to not only reflect your style, but also allow your food to shine.  When materials vary too much, you might take attention away from the food and more to the vessel. That being said, switching it up a bit can’t hurt either – you don’t want the muffins to blend in with the croissants!

The product designers at Cal-Mil certainly keep up with the current trends, and one of our favorites is this crushed bamboo beer sampler tray. It seems like everything these days comes with a mini chalkboard on it, but for a sampler tray – it truly elevates the customer experience to see the names of what they’re trying.  You’ll also notice the risers on the bottom – that’s a unique design intended to make the tray easier for servers and patrons to lift from the table and avoid spilling those precious samples.  While originally intended for beer sampling, these chalkboard sample trays could certainly be used for other tastings. Why not use one for sampling other beverages like coffee, wine, or whiskey? Salsa sampler? Gelato taster? As long as you have a vessel that’s 2 ½ inches across the bottom, you could really sample anything using these Cal-Mil tasting boards.

There’s so much more Cal-Mil offers, so be sure to check out all of their unique displays and serving solutions. And keep checking back, we’re always adding new designs from this forward-thinking brand!