Organising a successful brokerage event requires real focus and detailed knowledge of the topic. Whilst the subject specialists are key to the process of developing a successful event, at TRADEIT our approach has been to assemble a group of partners, with wide ranging contacts in their marketplace in addition to their specialist knowledge of one particular sector.

Accordingly, the Polish Dairy Hub Manager, in designing the programme for the Dairy event used the knowledge and contacts of TRADEIT colleagues to bring in a European wide dimension. However his own extensive professional and academic network underpinned the development of a program that reflected the needs of the producers and the latest thinking in academia.

TRADEIT is a project that is all about international co-operation, so the proposed schedule was shared with colleagues in other states and with the dairy producer SMEs who were already part of the project to ensure that the topics were relevant across the whole of the project area. The result was a program of speakers and researchers who offered new opportunities to the whole group of attendees.


Participants at the Poznan Dairy Brokerage Event

This focus is very important: it is essential to attract a good mix of researchers, technology providers and SME attendees. The topics to be discussed therefore have to be attractive to all. This requires a careful balancing act and still the agenda needed  to be finalised in enough time to advertise it to the small businesses we need to attend. Small business needs are generally for technologies that can be adopted rapidly. In general the time people have for development work is short and investment in the business needs to be for relatively quick returns. This means that the technologies showcased need to be ready, or close to being ready, for the market.

The event in Poznan focussed on the needs of the Dairy Industry. As the organisers of the event, Food Concept is very well connected in this industry. Because of this, they were able to draw together speakers to cover four broad topics:

• Trends in Dairy Markets
• New technologies in Traditional Dairy Production
• Sustainable Dairy Processing
• Food Safety and Authenticity

This programme attracted ninety-three attendees from Poland, Ireland, Belgium, the UK, Italy, Portugal and Spain. Most of them took part in the one to one meetings, (152 meetings took place), that were organised with other participants to discuss their needs and create new opportunities to innovate. It’s still early days but some very exciting projects have been started.

To maintain the theme, producers of local cheeses were present at the conference, sparking interest in their products from a number of European producers and a trip was organised to visit a Polish Dairy plant. All in all it was a fascinating event from which anticipate some exciting collaborations.