Manufacturing · McCormick Place, Chicago, IL · Oct 18-21, 2026

PACK EXPO 2026lead capture

The honest read on PACK EXPO 2026: what the organizer scanner really costs, what the badge encodes, and whether the venue WiFi holds up. Tendro is a lead capture app: your booth team scans badges and business cards with their phones, and it is $499 flat for the whole team at one event. One $499 fee covers every phone on your booth staff, instead of renting scanners per device.

Start free trial See the cost breakdown

Test the free desk trial: point a phone at last year's badges and a stack of business cards and judge the enrichment yourself. No credit card.

PACK EXPO 2026 fact sheet

Organizer scanner rental

$400–$700

per device per event, cross-show order forms; XPress Leads quotes behind the exhibitor login

Complimentary venue WiFi

768 Kbps

McCormick Place's own published cap

Show days · order clock

Oct 18-21, 2026

McCormick Place, Chicago, IL. Rental rates step up in tiers, advance to onsite.

Tendro (our line in this table)

$499 flat

whole booth team, one event, any badge from their phones

The basics

PACK EXPO 2026 at a glance

Packaging and processing OEMs work this floor, and most booths run several staff at once.

Show dates	October 18-21, 2026
Venue	McCormick Place, Chicago, IL
Lead retrieval	Organized by PMMI. Lead retrieval by CDS XPress Leads.
Who exhibits	Manufacturing

The scanner cost

What does lead retrieval cost at PACK EXPO 2026?

Lead retrieval at PACK EXPO 2026 runs through XPress Leads, priced behind the exhibitor login. Cross-show order forms run $400 to $700 per device.

CDS XPress Leads does not publish the PACK EXPO 2026 price sheet. It sits behind the PACK EXPO Exhibitor Resource Center login. What is public is the cross-show band from XPress Leads and comparable lead-retrieval order forms: about $400 to $700 per device per event. The highest onsite handheld rate on the order forms we have collected is $735. We do not quote a show-specific number the vendor has not published.

Expect the usual staircase. An advance rate, then a standard rate, then the onsite rate. Order early and it lands nearer the low end. Walk up on day one and it lands near the top. Every device is a separate line.

The badge

What does the PACK EXPO 2026 badge actually encode?

The PACK EXPO badge prints a QR that encodes an opaque CDS registration ID. Only the XPress Leads scanner resolves it.

That ID is a license plate. It means nothing without the CDS database behind it, so the organizer's own scanner is the only device that resolves the encoded ID, while Tendro captures the same lead by reading the printed face and enriching the rest.

No universal app, Tendro included, decodes the organizer's encoded badge ID; what Tendro reads is the printed face, the name, title, and company, and enrichment fills the verified email and firmographics the badge leaves off. Same for business cards and QR codes.

So the honest limit carries its own fix: without the organizer's licensed access (the rented scanner or a paid event API) no app resolves the encoded ID, and OCR plus enrichment returns the named, verified contact without waiting on the rental. The universal badge scanner explainer walks through how.

One more thing worth checking: exhibitor contracts vary on third-party capture policies, so read yours before the show.

The WiFi

Does the WiFi hold up at McCormick Place?

McCormick Place's own exhibitor WiFi guidance caps complimentary booth WiFi at 768 Kbps and points mission-critical traffic to a wired line.

768 Kbps is fine for email. It is not fine for a booth full of reps pushing scans and enrichment at once. The venue itself points mission-critical traffic to a wired dedicated line.

It gets worse under load. Show-floor WiFi is half-duplex, and per Cisco's high-density WiFi design guidance, a single access point degrades past roughly 25 clients per radio. The busiest hour on the floor is the hour the signal is thinnest.

Tendro captures to the phone first. Every scan queues locally with its real timestamp and syncs in order when the connection returns, so a soft WiFi bar never costs you a lead. The offline capture write-up covers how the queue behaves when the venue drops.

The alternative

What is the $499-per-event alternative?

Tendro is $499 per event with unlimited team members, never per device. A five-person booth pays one flat fee, not five rentals.

PACK EXPO is a PMMI show, so packaging and processing OEMs staff most booths, and the lead-retrieval price sits inside the PACK EXPO Exhibitor Resource Center login instead of a public sheet. You cannot see the per-device rate until you are already an exhibitor, which is what makes the flat $499 simple to compare against.

One fee, not per device.$499 covers the whole booth. Unlimited devices, unlimited scans. A five-person team is one rental, not five.

Season pass for a full calendar.Running the year? The season pass prices shows in volume, a flat per-event rate that drops as you add events.

Any CRM with a public API.Salesforce, HubSpot, or any CRM with a public API. Sync starts with your first paid event, under 10 seconds scan to record.

Start free trial The hidden cost of organizer scanners

The desk trial

How do you test it before PACK EXPO 2026?

Run the free desk test before PACK EXPO 2026: scan old badges and business cards, judge the enrichment, then decide.

The free trial is the scan-and-enrichment desk test. Point a phone at last year's badges and a stack of business cards, watch what Tendro reads and enriches, and grade the data before PACK EXPO 2026 opens.

We do not publish a blanket enrichment match rate. Industrial badges enrich differently than SaaS ones, which is exactly why the desk test exists: run it on your own badge stack.

The free trial covers capture and enrichment; CRM sync switches on with your first paid event, so you test field mapping against a real show, not a sandbox. The desk test costs a lunch break and answers the enrichment question before any show is on the line.

Straight answers