The inaugural Gulfood Manufacturing, held at the World Trade Centre in Dubai (November 9-11) gathered more than 10,000 regional and global trade visitors, as well as 1,500 delegates, with more than 1,000 international suppliers participating in the specialist B2B platform.
Gulfood Manufacturing offered large multinational food producers the opportunity to explore MEASA expansion and provided regional food manufacturers a one-stop-shop to source the latest ingredients, processing machinery, packaging equipment and logistics, warehousing and cold chain solutions to replace and upgrade production line equipment.
The specialist two-day Bakery Innovations Summit presented by Bakery Initiatives (the Netherlands) was held during the first two days of the show and included a special focus on the frozen industry and its influence in the bakery market, as frozen bakery accounts for 8 per cent of the total frozen food market.
One of the highlights of the summit provided insights into how the frozen process is changing the bakery market. “The question is not how it is changing the market, but how it will keep on changing it,” summarized Oliver Sergent, Mecatherm’s CEO, as the process can provide “fantastic business opportunities”.
The presentations also offered insights into vacuum cooling as a golden opportunity for food safety and quality improvement in baked goods, exploring the functional principles and advantages of vacuum cooling. Patrick Duss, senior consultant of Avenidas (Switzerland) detailed on the batch and continuous vacuum cooling systems.
Split into three segment-specific sectors – Food Logistics Middle East, ProPack Middle East and Ingredients Middle East – the first edition of Gulfood Manufacturing has drawn international machinery, equipment, product and service suppliers from 52 countries to DWTC.
With 24 official country pavilions spread across the show floor, Gulfood Manufacturing also rolled out the global food industry’s largest-ever Hosted Buyer Program, an initiative designed to highlight the region’s rapidly expanding F&B manufacturing and production infrastructure to influential buyers from countries including Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Egypt, Turkey, South Africa, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Libya, Iran and Nigeria amongst others.