Food is an exciting business

Setting the pace for the recently concluded Food Business Summit 2024, in his opening address, Amitabh Taneja, Chairman & Editor-in-Chief, IMAGES Group said, “Food is an exciting business. The scope and the opportunity of food is perhaps the largest amongst all retail categories.”

Standing at the intersection of convenience and experience, the dynamic food & beverage sector is evolving swiftly and growing rapidly. “Aligned with this trend, I strongly believe that our newest platform, Food Business Summit, not only saw the creation and sharing of great content, but also led to collaborations, reaping real benefit for the industry at large.”

“We are blessed with a very safe and secure environment for the industry to grow, thanks to the leadership of the country. So, we should take greater care of the country’s economy. There’s no denying the power of small and medium-sized companies, with SMEs accounting for approximately 70% of the 30,000 food outlets in Dubai, forming the bedrock of our economy. We must encourage the growth of local, home-grown brands,” added Mohamed Alabbar, Founder of Noon during his keynote address.

Talking about how the UAE hospitality industry has undergone an “amazing reset” post pandemic,Amit Nayak, Vice Chairman – UAE Restaurants Group & Vice President – HAMA MEA shared some statistics during his welcome address. “Post pandemic, we looked at experiences, real estate and our cost of operations holistically. As a result, today we’re seeing a 22% increase in occupancy rate year-on-year. The hospitality business is expected to touch almost $7.5 billion in 2024, growing to $10 billion in 2029. This pace of growth within the sector is amazing, which isn’t happening anywhere else across the globe.”

Highlighting the role of technology in food business, Stefano Galgani, Sales Application and Innovation Manager, Unicoop Firenze stated, “Self-checkout is the need of the hour. We adopted this technology to reduce the rush and queues in our stores. However, we are also mindful of the adoption of this technique and only use it in selected stores with good lane spacing. Today we operate over 186 stores, and our mission is to provide groceries at a lower price and in-store technology helps us amp up the offerings and convenience for our customers. While the self-checkout zones help the small to medium-basket customers, we always try to balance this ease of payment with cashier-driven traditional checkout approaches.”