Paddy Barry, of Barrys Bakery Ireland participated in the TRADEIT Sustainability Brokerage Event which ran as a parallel session at Anuga FoodTec in Cologne.  For Paddy Barry the event was very useful in establishing initiated discussions and meetings with technology providers. “Overall it was a great experience for me, gaining new technical information, business contacts and friends”.

Barry’s Bakery was established in 1925 in Tralee Co Kerry. This family run business delivers bread and confectionaries daily to local and regional communities and supermarkets.  Of particular fame is the classic, long-established Barry’s Sliced Pan. Barry’s strives to honour traditional and wholesome recipes perfected over generations, while simultaneously responding to the changing demands, tastes and health concerns to develop innovative, new products and product varieties. In line this sustainability is a key issue for the Bakery, both from an economic and environmental perspective and a motivation for participating in Sustainability Brokerage Event.

In discussions post event, Paddy informed that the presentations were of “great interest and benefit”. The sector specific demo tours on day 2 of the Brokerage Event as were “the best part, seeing the technologies in action really explained how these systems could be applied in the bakery”.

However Paddy was quite clear on the challenges associated with technology upgrading for artisan bakeries such as Barry’s Bakery, in particular “implementation costs could be prohibitive in some instances”. Furthermore “regulation presents an additional barrier to the integration of new technologies as new systems could potentially add further costs to the business” outside of the capital expenditure.

On the trade fair “AnugaFood Tech was a fantastic opportunity for the participating SMEs providing an opportunity to view cutting edge food processing systems in operation” Whilst majority of systems on show were beyond the scale of operations in Barry’s Bakery an unexpected discovery for Paddy was that exhibitors had technologies portfolios for the smaller scale SME food producers that were not at the show. In fact many of the companies will bespoke develop smaller scale production equipment; however cost is as always an issue.

A huge amount of information was presented, shared and discussed over the 2 days of the Sustainability Event. What was equally beneficial and in fact more readily actionable are the new contacts made and information shared in conversation via the B2Match brokerage meetings and networking opportunities integrated into the 2 day agenda.  TRADEIT will continue to collaborate with Barry’s Bakery.