From May 17 to 19, the Bilbao Exhibitions Center congress venue will bring together more than 7,000 visitors to celebrate the Food 4 Future – Expo Foodtech. This great international event on innovation in the food and beverage industry will allow 253 exhibiting companies to present more than 700 solutions in food technology, robotics and automation, safety, food science and processing and packaging techniques.
Among the organizations that will show their novelties we find names of the prestige of Ibermática, Tecnalia, Chemometric Brain, BCC Innovation, TTAF, Eurecat, Basque Food Cluster, Blendhub, Lantern, Multiscan Technologies, IFR SAU, AZTI, Dassault Systèmes, BASF, Buhler, CEIN , Agrobank, Beaz, Sener, Icex, Infor Software Iberia, T-Systems, CNTA, EIT FOOD, Convertix, Pal Robotics, the Basque Government, the Bilbao City Council and the Bizkaia Provincial Council.
As María Naranjo, director of the Food Industry of the public export and investment entity ICEX, has explained, Spain is today the seventh largest food exporter. To maintain and reaffirm this leadership position, it is important to continue working hard to “promote innovation and technology, to provide solutions to current challenges, such as sustainability goals, new alternatives to proteins or changes in eating habits. consumption”.
In Naranjo’s opinion, Food 4 Future is much more than a meeting between companies and professionals; It is also a great opportunity to “create knowledge, network and generate connections between all the links in the industry.” Something similar thinks Mauricio García de Quevedo, general director of the Spanish Federation of Food and Beverage Industries (FIAB), for whom this meeting provides an ideal setting for companies in the sector to reactivate their activity after the global health crisis that we have experienced in The last two years.
Under the slogan The FoodTech Revolution, one of the main objectives of the second edition of Food 4 Future will be to contribute to the positioning of the Spain FoodTech Nation brand at an international level, as well as to offer professionals from the entire value chain of the food industry a endless opportunities to find technological partners that allow them to promote innovative methods and procedures in their operating model.
This event will also host, during these days, the celebration of the Food 4 Future World Summit, the largest European congress on technological innovation in food, in which the latest trends can be discovered, success stories and contact with transformative tools, all this from the hand of more than 380 international experts.
The speakers will address, among other issues, topics such as the use of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence in the efficient production of food in the fishing, meat and agritech industries, or the impact that new technologies are having on improving aspects related to health and food safety.
On this occasion, the guest country will be the Netherlands, for its outstanding leadership in foodtech and digitization, and its ability to join forces and share the same strategy in the renewal of the industry. Its commitment to production using sustainable methods has already raised this northwestern European country to second place among food exporters.
Among the long list of guests who will visit the Bilbao Exhibitions Centre, we find representatives of major brands, such as Carmen Gómez-Acebo, head of Sustainability at Coca-Cola, Ricardo Fernández, director of Quality and Sustainable Development at Carrefour or Alejandro Arranz, director of Corporate Ventures and New Technologies of Mahou San Miguel; also to outstanding professionals of the best gastronomy in our country, such as Andoni Luis Aduriz, chef and founder of Mugaritz, or Ignacio Muñoz, CEO of Angulas Aguinaga; as well as specialists and academics of the stature of José M. Ordovás, Director of Nutrition and Genomics at Tufts University and Paul Newnham, director of SDG2 Advocacy Hu, among many others.
In total, there will be 183 hours of conferences, spread over 6 auditoriums, in which crucial issues for the sector such as automation, new processing techniques, new generation ingredients or sustainability will be discussed.
Food 4 Future will also be the meeting place for the Foodtech Startup Forum 2022, the largest global event for startups and entrepreneurs in the foodtech sector, which will take place in an exclusive space of more than 4,000 square meters during the 3 days of the event. There, these entrepreneurs will be able to make contact with investment funds, corporate ventures, leading food companies and international technology clusters.
Foodtech Startup Forum 2022 is conceived as a knowledge platform to promote entrepreneurship and the most disruptive projects, based on technologies such as the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, Data Analytics or new ingredients and foods developed through biotechnology.
In addition, the team of the international organization Get in The Ring, together with ICEX, will celebrate the first edition of Get in The Ring Bilbao, in which investors and corporations will meet, one by one, with emerging companies in order to evaluate them based on of its scalability. The two best ones, chosen by the investors and the rest of the partners, will face each other in a final rhetorical duel that will take place in a boxing ring, before the Food 4 Future audience.
The fifth edition of the EIT Food Innovation Forum, an event specialized in personalized nutrition, will be dedicated, on this occasion, to addressing the challenges that prevent consumers in the European Union from adopting optimal nutritional behaviors. The behavioral changes necessary to enjoy healthy aging will be thoroughly analyzed, and synergies will be woven that facilitate prevention and the incorporation of good habits in the so-called silver population.
On Wednesday, May 18, the European FoodTech Nations Summit will bring together executive directors, plant managers, IT managers and research managers from the food industry, together with public policy professionals in the field of food and agriculture in Europe. The objective will be to deal with transcendental issues for this industry, such as the acceleration of the transformation of food systems, the contribution of food production in the fight against climate change or the fulfillment of the objective of the so-called Green Deal (or European Green Pact). .
Lastly, the Food Tech Innovation Awards 2022 will recognize the work and excellence in the food and beverage industry of those companies that are most resolutely committed to innovation and that are best adapted to the new era of digitization.
All these activities, together with many others, will serve, ultimately, to help create a more solid environment that allows companies that are part of the food and beverage industry to face the technological revolution that we are experiencing with guarantees of success. in different areas, and at the same time continue to progress in terms of quality, sustainability and nutrition.
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