Gulfood Manufacturing draws global audience for equipment and systems
Cama Packaging's Renato Dell'Oro, at this year's Gulfood Manufacturing. Pic: Neill Barston
This year’s Gulfood Manufacturing has featured a broad range of key debate and insights surrounding the future of the food and drink sector for the region, including its confectionery, snacks and bakery interests, writes Neill Barston.
With a total of 3,000 exhibitors across the show, the event attracted a broad international melting pot of businesses across the sector, eager to showcase their latest industry innovations across equipment, systems and ingredients.
Confectionery Production, as a media partner for the event, spoke to many companies at the trade fair, which produced a number of exhibitors at the show, including at its key international pavilions highlighting machinery developments for the region, and wider global market (see our next edition for full coverage).
Speaking on the company’s participation, Renato Dell’Oro, of Italy’s Cama Packaging group, revealed that the event had yielded strong interest from its global base of visitors.
He said: “As with every year at Gulfood is really exciting, very busy, and also a very good hub for business within the Middle East region. We have had a range of visitors, so it’s been really good to be here. For this year; we have mainly focused on snacks and confectionery, but we have also had an amazing response to other areas such as our coffee business,” explained the company’s regional sales manager in the wake of its awards success at this year’s World Confectionery Conference.
Notably, the show’s second day featured its Food Tech Summit, with topics of discussion included inventionsand best practices within supply chain and logistics, the evolution of food safety and quality control, and how the food industry can work together to deliver sustainable impact.Bobby Krishna, Senior Food Safety Specialist -Dubai Municipality gave insight into how Dubai has leveraged digitalisation to improve food safety:
“We were lucky to have digital momentum from the early 2000s. That gave us an enormous amount of data in digitalformat, which we are currently usingto make our decisions. We are able to use that data to predict problems.
For its part, ISM Middle East, the biggest and most dynamic confectionery and snacks event in the Middle East andNorth Africa (MENA), saw the announcement of the winners ofISM Middle East New Product Showcase.
Me Gusto Sp. z.o.o pickedup Best Bakery Product for its organic wafer with peanut butter, Magical Flavors for the Food Industry wonin Best Hard and Soft Candy for its Marshzone Marshmallow Fries, Gia Siming (zhuhai) Food Technology Co., Ltd. scoopedBest Chocolate Product for its lyophilisedchocolate, and Matis Bros S.A.was awarded Best Snack Product for its tahini spread with rice crispie.