Meeting more than 400 producers in 2 days!? It’s possible thanks to SIAL!
For more than 40 years, the SIAL trade fair – Salon International de l’Alimentation – has been one of the world’s largest events for all the players in the food industry. After a four-year absence due to the pandemic, SIAL was back from 15 to 19 October 2022 at the Parc des Expositions de Paris Nord Villepinte.
This year, for the first time, Open Food Facts decided to visit this fair to engage with food producers. And this, despite the transport strikes – that’s how motivated we were 💪
In a few figures, SIAL is :
- 240,000 m² of exhibition space (the equivalent of 32 football pitches!) spread over 8 Halls
- 7,280 exhibitors from 127 countries (among which 90% international)
- 265,000 professionals and visitors
So why did Open Food Facts visit SIAL?
Our main objective during these two days was to engage with international producers and manufacturers.
We consider that the awareness and development of the French Open Food Facts product database are now decent. To continue to increase our impact, we are therefore seeking to meet with food industry players in our neighbouring countries: Germany, Spain, Italy, etc., and thus establish our reputation in Europe as the food database referential.
There were no less than 800 Italian exhibitors at the show, so we were not disappointed with the trip! 🙂
During these 2 days, we were particularly focused on meeting the exhibitors, but SIAL is also an opportunity to listen to conferences (SIAL Talks), to participate in culinary workshops or to discover culinary trends of 2030, among others.
What we take away from these two days
- Italian and Spanish producers were largely represented
- More and more producers are putting environmental issues at the heart of their business (alternative products to meat, cereal-based milk, etc.)
- The majority of French companies have recognised us and support our mission
- The trend of food scanning applications is very specific to France. Very few international producers can name a scanning application.
- The message carried by Open Food Facts is mostly welcomed by producers. And the only obstacle, occasionally encountered, is not related to the subject of transparency itself, but rather due to the lack of internal resources.
We have taken this feedback on board and are aware that we have a role to play in easing the process of data sharing.
A first step forward has been the writing of a practical guide that allows professionals to get to grips with the Pro platform and import data in 30 minutes!
Beyond that, we continue to work on improving the Pro platform to make it more functional and user-friendly. This will encourage even more producers to be more transparent.
If you are a producer and want to contribute to a more transparent food system, write to us at producers@openfoodfacts.org.
If you are a contributor, interested in discovering the world of food from the inside, and motivated by the idea of convincing more manufacturers to share their data, please contact us at producers@openfoodfacts.org or directly via Slack in the #producers channel.
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