Magazine: Food industry in the spotlight

In the autumn of 2016 the Hungarian Chamber of Agriculture (NAK) started the Food Industry Panorama programme series: food processing companies can listen to presentations to learn about the latest issues. On 12 November the conference was organised for the fourth time and NAK president Balázs Győrffy gave the keynote speech. He revealed that the level of investment was down in the food industry, which was still the third biggest industry in Hungary. He spoke about the importance of strengthening and improving R&D capacities.

The next speaker was Tamás Éder, NAK’s food industry vice president, who reported on what the chamber had done to support food industry companies. In his view one of NAK’s most important tasks is knowledge transfer and informing members about world trends and innovations. He talked about the ‘Let’s learn together!’ programme, which aims at bringing the latest best practices from Hungary and abroad to food companies. Mr Éder also talked about practical training programmes organised by NAK, such as ‘Packaging innovations in the food industry’.

Minister of Agriculture Dr István Nagy informed that the main goal of development projects was to ensure the high quality of groceries. He mentioned that demand had increased for food products that are guaranteed to be safe. Shoppers can only make well-founded buying decisions if the necessary data are available to them. In his view the perfect solution to this problem would be a state-owned national trademark programme. At the moment there are 47 certification trademarks and 11,000 markings used on food products in Hungary.

Marcell Keleti, NAK’s food industry director took the floor next. He sketched up the activities of NAK’s food industry directorate to conference participants, also introducing their network of coordinators. This network of food industry coordinators consists of experts who regularly visit food producers at county level, making sure that information exchange is continuous. There are 7 coordinators at regional level who started working in September after one month of training. In just 10 weeks they already visited 153 food companies.

After the lunch break work recommenced with Gergely Papp, NAK’s deputy technical director general, who analysed the state of play in the food industry. He stressed that one of the biggest problems in sustainable food production is providing the planet’s growing population with quality protein. Scientists and innovation experts are working hard to solve this problem – possible solutions include eating insects, jellyfish and algae. Another interesting research direction is the 3D printing of food, which could reduce food waste.

The event’s last speaker was gastro-psychologist Dr. Forgács Attila, who told: eating habits are changing and this can also be seen very well from the fact there are more and more people suffering from eating disorders. He also talked about the importance of people’s desire to lose weight and the phenomenon of too many people being overweight.