Speciality & Fine Food Fair is totally awesome
The pass 2 weeks I been helping a friend of my who just begins her business venture preparing for a fair. It was held early this week, from 6-8th September 2009. The event is Speciality and Fine Food Fair 09 and it was held in Olympia , London. Olympia is an exhibition centre is west London covering an area of 16,000 m2
Basically the main purpose of this fair is to help SME (Small Medium Entreprise) to expand their business by creating a platform to showcase their products to interested party that hopefully will create a new market for them or even help them by creating product awareness among the consumers . Well during this year exhibition there are more than 500 exhibitors attending this fair exhibiting thousands of products. So what’s this fair all about ? like it says Speciality and Fine Food Fair, the products that been displayed in this fair are special type or food or should I say unique, you cant find them in those big supermarket like Tesco or Asda, they are not well known brand like Heinze or Pepsi or Heineken.
Some of the products are hundreds years old family recipe while some are simply new creations maybe merely few months old. Basically is an eye opening fair and I am glad that I manage to attend it as this is Trade only fair and not open to public. You can see wide range of products in this fair, from ice cream to cheese to beer and wine to even salted pork leg. Everything here is SPECIAL !!!
I attended all 3 days as someone thats interested in starting business in food industry this is defiantely one of the best place to be. Throughout the fair I manage to have a taste and feel of so many types of food from almost all the continents in the world . Some of the taste, flavours and testures are so new to me, is like I received enlightenment for God of Cookery aka Stephen Chow ..Haha… Well it is an eye opening event. I am suprised that there are so many methods of preparing food and how different culture can have different taste buds.
Beside helping my friend out I do walk around with her husband talking to other business owner about their experience and problems they face during their business venture. Some of them really perserved in achieving their goals even the wall of China cant stop them, listening to them really inspire me. I learned alot of things from them, things like :-
1. how to count profit
2. how to keep marketing simple
3. ways to maintain your market share
4. increasing sales
5. increase productivity & etc
I know what I mentioned might sound simple and I believe most of you had come across all those while in college and some of you might even know the world greatest knowledge of all those but I believe what I learned from them are so much valuable as this are real people in real business in real world and sharing with me directly without those writers or editor in between us. The problems they face and overcome are real. I also managed to attend a few talks regarding to food business. I also bump into a few successful Malaysians and Singaporeans business people during the fair and had a in depth conversations with them.
This is a giant step for me in achieving my dream, I am glad that I attended this fair and it is one of the best time I had in UK so far , it is even better than seeing United lost to Burnley. Thats how great I felt. Hopefully I will be here again next year and maybe few years down the road I will be one of the exhibitors there proudly showing off my products.
