PATAZA Pty Ltd was very pleased to attend the C&I Expo in Melbourne Australia on 30th and 31st March 2022. The Food and Wine industry has been challenged over the past 2 years of Coronavirus and it was fantastic to see people attending a non-virtual tradeshow, and whilst attendance of visitors and exhibitors was no doubt impacted, there were still quite a lot of visitors and high-quality products and categories on display.

Convenience & Impulse Retailing (https://www.c-store.com.au/) is a Champion for the C-Store and FMCG industry in Australia. We have had a long and close relationship with this magazine and now digital company, starting many years ago with Keith Berg, and today with Safa de Valois at the helm, and it was great to see Safa and his team at the event and the way the event was presented is a testament to their passion for the industry.

From a Products perspective, there were around 100 exhibitors at the event, ranging from multinational suppliers such as Nestle, Coca Cola and Asahi Beverages down to smaller suppliers just launching new products to the market. As well, there were several Merchandise, Software and Retail Hardware exhibitors.

Products that we found particularly interesting were the following:

1. Love Buds  Plant Based products. This exhibitor also wone our internal vote for Best Stand at the show. We have tried many Meat replacements and have found them to be quite tasteless or wrong texture. Love Buds products, however, taste good – we tried the Hamburgers and the Sausages, and the taste was very close to real meat products. We have already recommended this product to some of our customers in Asia and they want to try this.