The Catalan Food Forum gets under way

On 10 March the Catalan agri-food sector meets at the Catalan Food Forum to discuss how to add value to our products through local sourcing. Titled "Origin as value", the event will again take a strongly business-focused approach, with experts analysing various competitive strategies linked to the origin of food. Registration remains open on the event website.

REGISTRATION OPEN

Data on local food consumption

The welcome will be given by Carmel Mòdol, Secretary for Food at the Department of Climate Action, Food and Rural Agenda. He will hand over to Ramon Sentmartí, managing director of Prodeca, who will present the first-ever mapping of the consumption and marketing of local produce in Catalonia from a commercial perspective.

Programme and confirmed speakers

Journalist Clara Sánchez-Castro will host the event, structured in four thematic blocks: 'Trends and opportunities', 'Marketing and competitiveness', 'The local sourcing of the future' and 'Digitalising origin'.

Kantar World Panel's food director, Joan Riera, will discuss the Glocal Food concept and how it has gone from a trend to a purchase driver. This first block will close with Mila Valcárcel, director of Eatable Adventures, a food company specialising in connecting the most disruptive emerging projects with investors in order to build the food companies of the future. Valcárcel's talk will focus on origin as a transformative element for food companies.

The second block, 'Marketing and competitiveness', will take the form of a round table moderated by Pablo de la Rica, head of AECOC's retail and food knowledge area. The debate will feature several purchasing managers from the main agri-food distribution chains in Spain, as well as a representative of a major Latin American supermarket company.

After the break, the event resumes with a presentation byAntonio Turiel, a research scientist at the CSIC, who will analyse the future prospects for local sourcing, raising challenges such as the energy crisis, substituting raw materials, rising transport costs and the new supply chain paradigm.

The programme of talks will close with Javier Sirvent, a technology evangelist who specialises in shaking up established certainties and totems. His talk "Calçots and robots, a technological future for food" is sure to leave no one indifferent.

The Catalan Minister for Climate Action, Food and Rural Agenda, Teresa Jordà, will close the event.

A networking space with Àpats Catalunya catering

Aiming to be a meeting point for the sector, the Catalan Food Forum is reviving networking spaces to help build new relationships among the professionals who make up the agri-food business community. After the round table there will be a break of around 40-45 minutes so attendees can talk to one another, as well as a standing lunch at the end of the event, in the same El Born Centre de Cultura i Memòria venue. The catering will carry theÀpats Catalunya label, whose distinguishing feature is local sourcing and local produce.

EUREGA round table

As part of the 2nd Catalan Food Forum, the Interreg EUREGA project will hold its Dissemination Event as the project's closing event. It will present existing European public food procurement policies and practices and will feature experts from different countries debating in a round table moderated by Arnau Queralt, director of the Advisory Council for the Sustainable Development of Catalonia (CADS), on how to promote a more sustainable food system through public food procurement.

Live streaming on Prodeca's website

The 2nd Catalan Food Forum can be followed in person or online, via the event website and Prodeca's YouTube channel: the stream will be available in both Catalan and English.

REGISTRATION OPEN