We want to hear from you…

Confectionery consultant Graham Godfrey, a long-standing member of the Confectionery Production editorial board and regular contributor to the magazine wants to hear from you…

Dear reader…

During the time I have been writing for Confectionery Production, I have tried to choose article topics that I felt would be interesting and useful to you. The emphasis has been on innovation and trying to help small to medium sized companies grow.

However, although I have a lot of experience in the confectionery industry, I obviously don’t know what your particular issues and interests are.

In many ways that is what makes the role of an independent technical and commercial consultant like myself so interesting; every project that comes along is different and sets new challenges.

I already provide a lot of the people who contact me with advice and help during a phone conversation or simply via email. This has included answering enquiries from all over the world and it is really interesting to have to work out a solution in a completely different framework to that normally encountered. This can lead to questioning assumptions in another environment – what is actually wrong with a low cost, highly quality, innovative product that is outside normal product specifications?

So, I would like to invite you, as readers of Confectionery Production, to come up with some interesting and important problems that you need help solving. Of course company confidentiality is important and will be respected and companies will not be mentioned by name unless they are happy for us to name them. Equally it is not difficult to generalise a particular issue so that confidential information is not revealed.

There are a huge variety of issues that can affect businesses, both technical and commercial. In what has become a rapidly changing world, these issues can include the need to innovate and produce new products, ingredient availability and cost, manufacturing problems, product quality, waste and effluent, energy costs, and plant capacity and efficiency.

The way in which a problem is approached can vary considerably depending on its context, so it is useful to have some basic information about the business and the environment in which you are working in addition to the obvious information about the nature of the problem and the scale of operation.

In addition to fairly specific problems, there are also wider issues of more general interest that can be explored and I am equally willing to discuss these. Things like where the confectionery industry is heading, what are the trends, what product categories represent the biggest opportunities.

I cannot claim that I will personally be able to solve every problem you may have, but I have a wide range of contacts and associates who may well be able to help me and I will be pleased to give them credit.

Perhaps the best way to contact me is via the Confectionery Production website (www.confectioneryproduction.com) or Twitter pages or by emailing the editor.

We look forward to hearing from you.