Navigating Asia's Trade Shows: Insights from Tom Lanhove, Sales Manager at FAM STUMABO

For almost five years now, Tom Lanhove is FAM STUMABO’s Sales Manager in Asia. One of the main parts of the job is to exhibit our cutting machines at tradeshows all over the region. Tom has already visited a lot of them this year. What were his impressions?

“First of all, there were the ProPak shows in Southeast Asia. There’s ProPak Asia in Bangkok and ProPak Shanghai in China, two major tradeshows in terms of size, attention and attendance. The difference is that the Asia edition is truly pan-regional with visitors from all neighboring countries, while the Shanghai edition is a mostly domestic, intra-China event.”

“A little smaller is ProPak Vietnam, but it certainly has a dynamism and growth potential, in line with the country’s importance to global food production. It’s a fast-growing market due to the high volume of European, Japanese and South Korean investments in Vietnamese food manufacturing. This is also reflected in the strong international flavor of the expo. Fourth, we had ProPak Philippines, the smallest of the events and geographically the most remote and localized, partly due to the multitude of islands. All ProPak tradeshows have the same set-ups but are vastly different from each other.”

Tom also visited Taiwan to attend Foodtech Taipei, which is, according to him:

“An exceptional tradeshow in that it is both a domestic expo and directly oppositional to ProPak Shanghai for various reasons”.

Therefore, he describes Taiwan as a quite self-contained advanced market. Just like the FHA Singapore, Malaysia & Indonesia expos, Foodtech Taipei is a tradeshow where food producers and food machinery producers exhibit jointly, leading to interesting interactions.

As for the use of food cutting machines, Tom sees some differences between the regions:

“Tropical fruits dicing and shredding is more popular in Southeast Asia, while China and Taiwan handle more frozen meat, fries, chips and fresh cut. Fruit and vegetable snacks are popular in all regions, although potatoes are mostly limited to China, Korea, and Japan markets. Cheese, then, is experiencing rapid growth in all regions.”

The above tradeshows come to life with the expertise and support of our local partners; Primary Engineering Ltd. (Thailand), Beijing Lenno Machinery (China), ULIFE (Taiwan), Rieckermann (Philippines) and Saikopack (Vietnam).