Valued More than Ever: Reliability and Dependability

EACH year, we ask industry players for their insights and opinions on what customers in Asia can expect in the year ahead, even as they look back on what has been a tough year globally. For many manufacturers in Asia, the crunch shut down their lines of credit and shrunk their markets. We asked them to look back to the tumultuous business year of 2009, and what they learned from its challenging conditions, and how do they intend to apply these lessons to achieve more in the Asian market in 2010. They give us their views on how their customers and consumers have changed, and whether they think will this change be permanent. (Consumers, for instance, are simplifying purchases or trading down to private label or store brands, and market analysts predict that this will be a regular lifestyle choice for most consumers.) This year抯 panel also tells our readers what food & beverage segments look promising for their own company, and what particular F&B will be popular among consumers in 2010. 慦hat have you learned from the challenging conditions in 2009, and how do you intend to apply these lessons in 2010 Our panelists come from ingredients specialists and developers Cargill Texturizing Solutions and Beneo-Group, carton packaging innovator SIG Combibloc, processing machinery leaders Gerstenberg Schr鰀er, Urschel, and Heat and Control, and top safety & inspection technologists Videojet, Cognex and Ishida.

Focusing on Value in Challenging Times

Weiyu Fan (Cargill): The food industry has had a tough year in 2009 with a much slowed rate of growth in the Asia Pacific region, and even negative growth in some markets. Our customers continue to face volatility, with issues from food safety and supply chain security, to commodity price volatility (e.g. sugar) and quality disruptions. During these tough times, manufacturers are looking to reliable ingredients partners, with the financial strength to sustain the economic cycle, high quality and food safety standards, reliable supply chain capabilities with multiple food ingredients and raw materials offerings, and expertise, market insight, and technical support in both specialty and commodity ingredients. In particular, we at Cargill are seeing time- and cost-pressed manufacturers looking to us to provide not just raw materials, but genuine cost-competitive and innovative reformulation solutions that will last beyond the recession. Cargill抯 proximity to markets and customers, combined with its proven expertise in applications and exceptionally broad portfolio of ingredients, enable our teams to offer reliable functional system or single ingredient reformulation solutions that meet the critical challenge of combining high quality with cost optimization. In 2010, we will continue to optimize the expertise of our food development experts, build on our integrated approach to responding to customers' needs and anticipate trends in consumer markets to best serve the ASPAC food and beverage markets. Henrik Pulz Hansen (Gerstenberg Schr鰀er): The key words are low energy consumption and environmentally friendly production. For years this has been taken into consideration in the R&D when Gerstenberg Schr鰀er develops new machines. Our scraped surface heat exchanger called Nexus uses CO2 as cooling medium and has low energy consumption. With the GS Kombinator X250 for ice cream less energy is used in the production than during a traditional ice cream production and the manufacturers are thus saving money. These enhancements are beneficial for the Asian food industry.







Andrew Neo (Urschel): The challenge for us is many food processors are more cautious in spendEntrainement Nike