AmeFT

Category: Events

  • SYMRISE OPENS CREATIVE CENTER IN EGYPT

    SYMRISE OPENS CREATIVE CENTER IN EGYPT

    Symrise inaugurated its Creative Center in Egypt on November 26, 2019. The subsidiary in the outskirts of Cairo comprises modern development and application laboratories for the categories Beverages, Confectionery, Dairy, Culinary and Snacks. Dirk Bennwitz, President Flavor EAME at Symrise, officially opened the new facilities. They meet the company’s global technology and development standards and are intended to strengthen the company’s reach in the AME region and its collaboration with strategic customers. Partners, customers and guests attended the ceremony.

    Symrise has equipped its development and application laboratories with state-of-the-art technology. Within the Creative Center, employees will develop customized product solutions and applications and adapt existing products for the market. Compared to its facilities so far, the new creative center offers a number of advantages. Modern consumer and market analysis and quality assurance procedures guarantee authentic and relevant products for customers and consumers in the region.

    “By investing in the new Creative Center, our strong team of food technologists and flavorists can make a significant contribution to the growth in the region in the future,” says Dirk Bennwitz, President Flavor EAME at Symrise. “We are convinced of the strategy, because our location in Cairo offers us proximity to customers and markets in Africa and the Middle East. In the future, we will be able to better serve demand in the region and optimally align our business with our customers, thus contributing to the company’s growth.”

    In the future, the Symrise team will have access to all the technologies and innovations available in the Group in the Creative Center. This will make it easier to meet customer demand. In addition, customers benefit from knowledge of the region and the increased use of local raw materials. This helps to meet the diverse wishes of consumers. Another advantage is that Symrise can work with its customers in a time- and cost-efficient manner.

    “We use a wide range of manufacturing technologies in Egypt to supply all of Africa and the Middle East,” says Ibrahim Wagdy, responsible Managing Director of Symrise in Egypt. “We are now expanding these capacities with our modernized site thereby increasing the attractiveness for our customers in the region.

    Egypt is an important location for Symrise. On the one hand, because the country’s location in the AME region makes it easy to exchange information with customers from Africa and the Middle East. On the other hand, the industrial and agricultural infrastructure provides valuable advantages for the production and development of flavors for the local market, Symrise announced.

  • ON THE ROAD TO IPACK-IMA 2021

    ON THE ROAD TO IPACK-IMA 2021

    The IPACK-IMA project involving 40 Italian companies and more than 30 North African professionals attracted keen interest and generated a total of 377 B2B meetings with high levels of satisfaction on the part of both exhibitors and buyers.Strengthening the show’s international appeal, consolidating relations with business communities and maintaining an increasingly strong focus on the processing and packaging supply chain in the food sector are the goals of ‘on the road to IPACK-IMA’, the series of initiatives organised to  engage with exhibitors and visitors in the lead-up to IPACK-IMA 2021.The second appointment in the programme, devoted to international buyers from the Maghreb region (Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia) and Egypt, was held in Milan on 11 and 12 November with a packed programme of company visits and meetings. The programme began in Palazzo delle Stelline, where the IPACK-IMA exhibitors met North African buyers selected in cooperation with the Italian Trade Agency ITA. It then continued in the factories of several of the companies, who welcomed the guests and presented the details and functions of the cutting-edge technologies they will be exhibiting at the trade show, a foretaste of what will happen on a larger scale at IPACK-IMA itself.Buyers from the “Food, Fresh & Convenience” and “Liquid Food & Beverage” categories visited: Sacchital, a specialist in flexible packaging solutions with materials capable of extending shelf life; Goglio, a company focused on flexible packaging of liquid, solid and powdered products and aseptic packaging of fresh food; and Smigroup, a leader in the packaging machine and bottling plant sector catering for production requirements of up to 36,800 bottles/hour. For the “Pasta, Bakery & Milling” category, one of the core sectors of IPACK-IMA, the guests met Italpast, a company specialising in plant and machinery for the production of fresh, dry, gluten-free and high-protein pasta, and Ocrim, a historic producer of milling plants, feed mills and cereal processing plants, from raw materials handling through to transformation of the finished product.North Africa is a dynamic and rapidly evolving market, especially in the foodpackaging sector. Egypt and Algeria in particular have excellent prospects with growth forecasts of +4.3% and +5% respectively for the three-year period 2019-2021 (source: Ipack Ima Monitor based on UCIMA Research Department data). The initiatives held in the lead-up to 2021 will consolidate the IPACK-IMA platform. The On the road to IPACK-IMAand MEAT-TECH programme, successfully launched with events devoted to Mexico and North Africa, will continue over the next few months with initiatives aimed at the Middle East and Turkey in March 2020, to be followed by Russia and Eastern Europe. The buyers program of IPACK-IMA 2021 is addressed to top decision makers from the entire massmarket and consumer durables industries, willing to invest in next-gen technologies and innovative materials for packaging and processing. A dedicated help desk will be activated in the next few months for all professionals who request to be qualificated as part of the Buyer program.To know more about selection requirements and the special advantages offered to IPACK-IMA guests, please write to: buyers@ipackima.itPhoto: IPACK-IMA

  • SORTEX A BRINGS 95% REDUCTION IN CUSTOMER COMPLAINTS

    SORTEX A BRINGS 95% REDUCTION IN CUSTOMER COMPLAINTS

    Antwerp-headquartered Miko Coffee prides itself on providing the highest quality coffee beans and commercial coffee machines. When small sticks and other foreign material in its coffee beans were causing customers’ grinders to jam, Miko Coffee invested in a SORTEX A. The optical sorter from Bühler is providing a superior coffee bean sort and since its installation the company has reported a 95% fall in customer complaints – generating significant time and cost savings. 

    Exporting to more than 40 countries, Miko Coffee provides high-quality coffee beans and commercial coffee-making machines to top hotels, cafés, Michelin-starred restaurants, events and exhibition centers, golf clubs, hospitals and a wide range of retail businesses. With more than 600 employees, Miko owns and manages coffee-service subsidiaries throughout Europe and in Australia.

    “In late 2013, some customers were contacting us because their coffee machines were becoming jammed by tiny pieces of stick, which remained in coffee beans we’d supplied,” remembers Bart Laps, Plant Manager of Antwerp-based Miko Coffee. “We were having to visit customer premises on technical call-outs, to remove sticks, clean machines and get them up and running again.” Foreign material (FM) in green coffee beans, usually Robusta, can include small pieces of stone, sticks and occasionally plastic and glass. Laps adds “Some batches of green coffee beans can contain many sticks, because when coffee is dried on the ground, these small pieces can easily become collected with the coffee beans. Users often pour whole bags of coffee into their machines, which can then become blocked if any small pieces are still present.

    The SORTEX A range of optical sorters have been designed to help processors overcome difficult sorting requirements.  They feature advanced inspection technology that identifies differences based on structural properties, enabling the sorter to simultaneously reject unwanted material of the same shape and color as the coffee bean.

    Previously, Miko Coffee had used a machine to sieve coffee beans before roasting, but its small mesh meant perfectly good coffee beans were being needlessly sorted out, which affected yield. Using a larger mesh would boost yield, but only remove larger FM. And, to compound the problem, wood has almost the same specific weight as green coffee and can therefore not be removed by a destoner.

    “Since we installed our sorter, customer complaints and resulting technical call-outs caused by sticks jamming and damaging machines have fallen by 95%,” Laps reveals. “And because we’re so satisfied – every bean we now process is sorted through our SORTEX A.” The time and cost savings Miko Coffee has made since installing its SORTEX A has helped to offset its investment costs, the company says.