WHAT ARE THESE PEOPLE SO HAPPY ABOUT THEN......?

...… maybe because they had all just contributed to a really fantastic Question Time style event held by the Food, Drink & Agriculture Group of the Chartered Institute of Marketing at the offices of MINTEL earlier this week in London.

The panel was made up of Jaime Cardenas from the Peruvian Trade Office, Michelle Charrington from INVEST NI, Martin Sutherland from the Welsh Food Centre at the Cardiff Metropolitan University, Luke Crossman from AHDB and Chris Kebbell from the New Zealand High Commission.

The overall theme for the evening was “what next for UK food and drink markets?” and hooray, we managed to get through the whole evening with only one direct question on the dreaded B – word.

I had the pleasure of chairing this  - and my job was made easy on the night, with some great questions and some equally good answers and discussion from the panel and the audience. We had a packed house of around 100 there on the night itself.

Once we got underway after a short presentation from Giles Shapley of Data Pad on some key current UK food market trends, the questions came thick and fast. They covered a range of areas, including:

• Veganism and flexitarians
• The future of the organic market
• Job opportunities for young people in the agri food supply chain
• The issue of food standards in a post BREXIT world and chlorinated chicken
•  The future consolidation and integration of supply chains
•  On line selling and marketing
• The future role of the discounters v. the Big 4 retailers
• The role of innovation, R & D and technology
• The importance of free trade deals between the UK, the EU, US, China and Oceania countries
• The impact of ASF on global food demand and supply

And all in just over an hour. I got the impression we could have gone on all night, if we had wanted to. But of course, we didn’t!

And what a pleasure it was to have with us 25 young American students from the CAPA business and culture study group with us. In a week when the UK hosted another US visitor of note, this group of people came across as highly engaged, positive, well informed, aware, confident, constructive and at times, concerned, young people - who also had a great sense of humour. They were not overawed by any sense of occasion and really seemed to enjoy the event too. A huge credit to themselves.

All in all – a great evening and while it had some very serious moments, also was very enjoyable. OK  - I am biased, but I really believe this to be the case.

So – thanks to the panel, thanks to the audience for coming, thanks to MINTEL and thanks to Giles Shapley from Data Pad.

And last, but certainly not least, to Rob Metcalfe from Richmond Towers (an FDA committee member) who ordered the wine and snacks – and served most of them too. They all went!

If you came to this - I hope you enjoyed it. If you didn’t, you really missed out. But regardless, come to our equally good looking next event in September, when we will have Charlie Bigham come and speak to us – see here for details:

https://www.cim.co.uk/event/97283

Both members and non members are welcome.

See you there, I hope !

John