Our Seminar on Importing and Exporting for Products and Ingredients
Please allow us this small bit of shameless self-promotion: We go to great lengths to make sure that our clients and potential clients are kept at the forefront of their industries and are well informed about the changing economic and legal environments that their businesses function in. We care about your business as much as you do, and to that end, whatever we can do to make sure you have the support you need, we do. Including thought provoking presentations on industry trends.
Our Food Industry Practice Team – which includes the Alcoholic Beverages practice – recently presented Global Midwest Alliance’s Chicago Winter food trade and technology event, “The Opportunity – and Challenge – of Expanding Food Imports to the United States.”
“The food industry is globalizing so fast that whatever I tell you today might be changed by next week,” explained Dr. Robert E. Brackett, keynote speaker at this half-day forum, which was held at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Brackett is Vice President and Director of the Institute for Food Safety and Health at the Illinois Institute of Technology and was one of a dozen speakers, including food company owners, government officials, food scientists and business professionals.
More than 150 foreign exporters and domestic importers; buyers, purchasing agents and procurement management from a range of food processing companies; local, state and federal regulators; and other diverse groups interested in expanding the international food trade listened to industry experts described how the global food system is changing not only in its regulation but in advances in food production, biotechnology, nutritional awareness and consumer choices. All this is against the backdrop of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), a sweeping set of food reforms signed into law in January 2011 and beginning to take effect this year. Other noted trends affecting the food industry include genetically modified foods, food traceability, food portability and the rise of culturally relevant food products, particularly in the Hispanic and Asian markets.
