​At Fruit Logistica 2019 in Berlin, Felix Instruments – Applied Food Science, of Vancouver WA launched the Avocado Quality Meter which uses near infrared analysis to assess avocado dry matter – a key indicator of the ultimate eating quality of an avocado.
 
The company mission is to provide fresh produce professionals with the tools to make data-driven decisions. Quality meters can be used post-harvest, or pre-harvest to manage the crop and select an optimal harvest date. Ripening facilities can use the instruments to achieve best results and reduce spoilage. “We have already shipped more than 30 avocado meters and plan to continue with around 25 devices per month. Our customers are growers and packers from Mexico, Peru, Spain, Russia, USA. We have distributors in approximately 30 countries, so equipment is available worldwide” says Felix.
 
Why are international trade shows good for new product launch? Felix points out, “At launch, there are typically very few reference accounts for a given product so live demonstrations are a reasonable substitute.  Further, most of our business is earned by referral and that includes both existing clients and contacts that have seen the product [sometimes at a trade show] and mention it to a colleague.”

High Impact Technology "HIT" is sharing a booth with our local customer at the 5 day long IDEX international defense trade show here in Abu Dhabi, UAE. We are one of about 120 U.S. companies representing their goods in the USA Pavilion.
 
Of the approximately 50,000 people at IDEX, we were honored to meet with and show our technologies to HH Sheik Mohamed Bin Zayad Al Nahyan - the acting President of the UAE.  We have been protecting his country's vehicles for 3 years now and he wanted to thank our team for saving UAE lives. Quite an honor for HIT and our local customer Continuum-ME.
 
IDEX is the largest Middle East based military show and over 80 countries are represented here.
 
HIT is proud to have 7 different companies at this trade show showing their vehicles which have our protection technology installed on them.

​We had quite a bit of rain on our final day in Singapore on Friday. But a tropical rainstorm in the tropics is no surprise and the extra rain only added a few minutes to our travel time to and from the trade show. The visitor crowd did seem a bit smaller, especially in the morning, but more or less stayed that way throughout the day. Once again, the traffic through our booth held up very well and we had very little of either our cheese or ice cream samples left at the end of the day.
 
Many good meetings were held during the day and we had a repeat visit from Mrs. Lee, the very enthusiastic customer who came by yesterday and called her store manager from our booth. Continued contact with Mrs. Lee and her preferred market are planned to continue in the future and a visit to her local store took place this afternoon. Many other ideas regarding a new market plan and other projects were discussed.
 
Once again our group split up in order to begin our various departures back to the US. Others of us, plus a former colleague, now with Lamb Weston, and her new manager, who are also here for the FHA show, came along with us for our tour to Lamb Weston.
 
Of all the reactions people have to seeing new things here in Asia, I think the best one is the reaction that people have when they see the panorama of the Port of Singapore from the Port’s viewing platform at the top of their Headquarters: container cranes as far as you can see, numerous ships of various types at anchor in the harbor, and the obvious level of frantic activity going on where ever one looks. In addition, because very few people are familiar with the work and activity that go on inside a large international seaport, the wonder in the eyes of first-time visitors when they are driven ‘inside the gate’ of the world’s second busiest container port is a great sight! Of the members of our small group of visitors to the Port of Singapore today, four of us were first-time visitors and the looks of wonder once again were visible on their faces. 
 
The Port visit marked the end of our Singapore trade mission trip. We all split up for dinner, some of us heading to the airport, others leaving early Saturday morning and during the day. It’s been a great trip, lots of activity and new colleagues met and the beginning of a new phase of our product development work here in SE Asia. We’re not quite there yet, but market entry is getting very close and I look forward to one day being able to announce the first shipments of cheese or ice cream to the area.

​We had quite a bit of rain on our final day in Singapore on Friday. But a tropical rainstorm in the tropics is no surprise and the extra rain only added a few minutes to our travel time to and from the trade show. The visitor crowd did seem a bit smaller, especially in the morning, but more or less stayed that way throughout the day. Once again, the traffic through our booth held up very well and we had very little of either our cheese or ice cream samples left at the end of the day.
 
Many good meetings were held during the day and we had a repeat visit from Mrs. Lee, the very enthusiastic customer who came by yesterday and called her store manager from our booth. Continued contact with Mrs. Lee and her preferred market are planned to continue in the future and a visit to her local store took place this afternoon. Many other ideas regarding a new market plan and other projects were discussed.
 
Once again our group split up in order to begin our various departures back to the US. Others of us, plus a former colleague, now with Lamb Weston, and her new manager, who are also here for the FHA show, came along with us for our tour to Lamb Weston.
 
Of all the reactions people have to seeing new things here in Asia, I think the best one is the reaction that people have when they see the panorama of the Port of Singapore from the Port’s viewing platform at the top of their Headquarters: container cranes as far as you can see, numerous ships of various types at anchor in the harbor, and the obvious level of frantic activity going on where ever one looks. In addition, because very few people are familiar with the work and activity that go on inside a large international seaport, the wonder in the eyes of first-time visitors when they are driven ‘inside the gate’ of the world’s second busiest container port is a great sight! Of the members of our small group of visitors to the Port of Singapore today, four of us were first-time visitors and the looks of wonder once again were visible on their faces. 
 
The Port visit marked the end of our Singapore trade mission trip. We all split up for dinner, some of us heading to the airport, others leaving early Saturday morning and during the day. It’s been a great trip, lots of activity and new colleagues met and the beginning of a new phase of our product development work here in SE Asia. We’re not quite there yet, but market entry is getting very close and I look forward to one day being able to announce the first shipments of cheese or ice cream to the area.

​Our next to last day at the Food & Hotel Asia (FHA) 2018 Trade Conference and Exhibition, was most extraordinary. Although it started out as just another day of exploration of the venue halls and short conversations with delegates across many different geographies, this changed rather completely early in the afternoon.
 
One of the first tasks of the day was to discuss our booth and our potential participation at the 2020 iteration of the FHA show (to be held in Singapore) with the management team at the US Dairy Export Council (USDEC). At this year’s FHA, we had a double booth, the result of a last minute cancelation by another producer company or organization. We were lucky to snag the extra space as we were joined this year by Tillamook Dairies, of Tillamook, Oregon as well as the return to FHA Singapore of Beehive Cheese from Utah. Thus we had one large commercial dairy and a smaller artisanal producer. In addition to Beehive’s sample cheeses, Tillamook brought both various different cheeses and eight varieties of ice cream.
 
At Trade Shows like FHA, it is impossible to predict attendance: how many visitors, either potential commercial buyers, or private citizens, will attend the exhibition and how many of those will come by your booth for a conversation or to try a sample of your product. Fortunately for us in 2018, attendance at the show has been quite strong and the number of people coming by our booth, both for conversation and sampling has been excellent. Both Beehive and Tillamook have had numerous conversations with potential buyers and many, many people have sampled both the various sample cheeses and the ice cream.
 
Thus it was not much of a surprise when a woman came by the booth on Thursday and asked me if I was working for Tillamook. I briefly explained my role and asked if she would like to speak to one of the Tillamook representatives at the booth. She asked if Tillamook was selling ice cream to a particular retail store company in Singapore and I referred her to one of the Tillamook team. It seems that Mrs. Lee (her real name) had been purchasing Tillamook ice cream at this store, but that the availability was inconsistent: sometimes they had it, sometimes not. When it was available, it always sold out quickly. She had tried other locations of the same store, with similar results. Mrs. Lee was very frustrated with this situation and she and her family really loved the ice cream, especially her son and his friends and the inconsistent availability was a big problem. She told that she had even spoken many times with the store manager, but without much success. She appealed to the Tillamook team to fix this appalling situation by making sure there was always enough of the ice cream available. We were all amazed by this totally random and impassioned testimonial about the quality and deliciousness of the product. To end the conversation, Mrs. Lee called the store and got the manager on the phone to advise that she was talking with the Tillamook people at the trade show and that they would be following up with the company – which they will certainly be doing!
 
My colleagues and I have been to many shows like the 2018 FHA, but none of us have ever before had a “Mrs. Lee moment”. It really made the day.
 
Once again tired and foot weary, we made our way back to the hotel to prepare for dinner and for our final day at FHA 2018 on Friday. 

​The second day of attendance at the Food & Hotel Asia Trade Show began with our departure from the hotel at about 8:15am. Traffic was unusually heavy and it took us just over an hour to reach the exhibition site. Singapore is not very big, only about 278 square miles, about 3.5 times the size of Washington, DC. It is an independent island nation, separated by the narrow Johore Strait from Malaysia and by the Singapore Strait from Indonesia. Singapore is located at only just over 1° of latitude north of the Equator, thus it experiences very tropical weather and a consistent amount and day and night time hours. Only about 1% of Singapore’s land is arable, thus it is almost completely dependent upon imports for its food. The population of Singapore is approximately 5.9 million people. Singapore is one of the wealthiest countries in the world when measured by GDP per person (at PPP) of about US$90,000) and it has a very high literacy rate of more than 97% of the population.
 
All of these factors have combined to make Singapore one of the world’s leading trading nations. As our group will learn on Friday when we will tour the Port of Singapore, the Port is the second largest container port in the world, having handled more than 30 million containers in 2016, second only to Shanghai.
 
Tuesday’s attendance at the show seemed to get off to a slow start and build up thoughout the day until a peak at about 3:00pm. While we do not have any attendance details, Wednesday’s crowd seemed to be very similar in numbers. During the early hours, until about 11:00am, it was a bit slow; it picked up through the lunch hour (or two) with what seemed to be a peak at around 3:00pm. We experienced a pretty consistent flow of people all day long beginning about 10:00am and running through about 3:00pm.
 
From the reactions of those people that stopped by and sampled our products, they appeared to very much enjoy the cheese products and to really enjoy the ice cream. Our processors had numerous conversations and many of those conversation will become sales leads to be followed up. The overall impression was highly favorable and we feel quite confident that the results will translate to sales within the coming months – clearly the primary goal of this mission.
 
While we had strong and consistent traffic all day, I had a number of opportunities to randomly do a search of the neighboring exhibition hall. While there were no obvious differences between the halls, the nest next one over looked to have had perhaps about 20% fewer visitors. This is based on visual look of only hall 8 next door). The booths of China and Turkey seemed to be particularly light on visitors.
 
The crowd began to noticeably thin out around 4:30pm and at 5:30pm we gave our weary feet and backs a break and headed back to the hotel. We’ll be back at it on Thursday!    

Tuesday morning was a ‘normal’ starting time day, an 8:00am departure from the hotel to the Trade Show venue. We had completed most of the double booth setup the previous afternoon and we expected to find everything in order on our arrival today. All was well, but we were still experiencing some sporadic temperature fluctuations with one of our sample refrigerators. Not a good thing considering we needed it for the duration of the Show to hold our cheese at an acceptable temperature. 
 
The Show opened on schedule at 9:00am and visitors began to arrive. Our two booth assistants were their instructions regarding how to serve the samples of ice cream we had brought to the Show. The samples of cheese in our second cooler were rearranged in order that they would be more accessible and we were ready to go.
 
A typical day manning a booth at an International Trade Show mostly revolves the importance of comfortable shoes. For the most you are standing around at the booth, speaking with your colleagues and with trade show visitors to the booth. Samples have to be watched to be sure that they are easily reached by booth visitors and that plenty of samples are always available. In the case of the Food & Hotel Asia Show, it is spread across about 10-12 enormous exhibition halls, each measuring tens of thousands of square feet, with many dozens of exhibitors, demonstrating with samples of a huge variety of food and beverage products. In order to see and visit as much of the trade show halls as possible requires literally miles and miles of walking on thinly carpeted concrete floors. At the booth, one is standing around or sitting on marginally comfortable stool-like chairs with no back. The exhibition halls are serviced with air conditioning, but you often must be standing or sitting in exactly the right spot in order to receive any benefit from the A/C. With the show floors open from 9:00am – 6:00pm it makes for a very long day.
 
On the other hand, it can be a fascinating experience. The best description I can offer is that it is like walking through a giant, multi-chambered cornucopia filled with every type of food and beverage imaginable from all over the world in booth after booth after booth. In many, if not most cases, samples of the products are offered for tasting, making walking the show floor something like a continuous human grazing experience, without account of eating any particular food in any particular order based on time of day or typical meal time for any specific food. Dessert items can be tried before anything like a protein or main course vegetable or accompaniment. Snack items can be tasted at any time at all: cookies, cakes, ice cream, candies, popcorn, chips, and confections of all sorts. Conversations with exhibitors occur very often and greatly add to the phantasmagorical nature of the experience. Stopping for any particular meal makes no sense at all because you’re actually never really hungry as a result of the continuous grazing aisle after aisle after aisle.
 
It’s a crazy, wonderful, exhausting, physically demanding, stomach filling (and churning) experience. Our day at the show ended about half and hour early to allow us to travel to an event sponsored by the US Dairy Export Council and various Dairy organizations, including our own Oregon Dairy and Nutrition Council. The 40-minute drive got us to the venue a bit early and the event at 6:30pm. It consisted of several speeches and more cheese and food tasting, plus wine and beer and water and juice and descriptions of the many varieties of American produced cheeses (there are more than 600 of these). There was networking with other exhibitors and with friends and colleagues met at other trade shows at other times and often held in other countries. After once again filling up with one more unneeded food grazing opportunity, we returned to our hotel just after 8:00pm, ending a more than 13-hour day.
 
The ever-present email monster and other miscellaneous office and personal messages awaited, together with this, now concluded edition of the 2018 Singapore Trade Show blog.
 
Until tomorrow…    

​With all of our participants in the 2018 PNW Dairy Trade Mission to the Food and Hotel Asia (FHA) 2018 trade show in Singapore having arrived without incident (no lost bags, no delayed flights, etc) we spent a quiet Sunday April 22, getting over jet lag and preparing the activities of the week ahead.
 
Our group is made up of Dairy industry people from Oregon, Washington, Utah and Arizona, all gathered here in Singapore to work to expand our region’s export of Dairy products to Asia.
 
Our first full day, Monday April 23rd was quite busy. We started our day with a brief ‘meet & greet’ in our hotel lobby. Some of our team are veteran Trade Show delegates with years of experience standing on their feet for hours at a time each day, always with a smile and a word of welcome to booth visitors. Others of our group are visiting either Asia or Singapore for the first time and will have to quickly adjust to the varied pace of a manning a trade show booth – more on this coming soon. Handshakes and business cards exchanged, we got started.
 
Our day began with a visit to an importer/distributor of dairy and other products to a myriad of companies here in Singapore. They do have a most interesting sector of concentration. The cruise ship industry is very active here in Singapore and our hosts are suppliers to many of the ship chandlery companies that provide supplies to the hundreds of cruise ships that dock in Singapore each year. The thousands of passengers onboard today’s modern cruise ships expect the best of food and drink and our are please to be able to provide food beverages from around the world to satisfy the ‘cruisers’ hunger and thirst. In addition, they are also providing so-called ‘ships stores’ to many of the cargo ships and foreign military vessels that call at Singapore’s astounding Port.
 
We’ll report more on the Port of Singapore Authority (PSA) later in the week, but suffice it to say, that at almost 31,000,000 TEUs in 2016, Singapore ranked second on the world’s busiest container port standings, behind only Shanghai in China. A truly huge number of containers handled in one year.
 
After lunch, we split into two groups: one part of our team did retail visits to scope out the local Singapore retail food market. The other group, including your correspondent, proceeded to the Trade Show venue to prepare our booth for the Show that opens tomorrow (April 23).
 
The look of a Trade Show venue the day before a show opens is quite chaotic. Venue staff and exhibitors are working at warp speed to get both the venue and individual booths ready for the onslaught of visitors expected on opening day. It was not different for us. We weaved our through empty boxes and crates and wooden pallets filled with exhibition materials. Wires and tapes product samples are everywhere, as are the chairs and tables and brochures and numerous other elements that make up a successful and frequently visited booth.
 
As we put our booth together and waited for our display materials and cheese and ice cream tasting samples to arrive, we checked for chairs and tables and serving utensils and cups and napkins and USA flag toothpicks (for spearing and serving cheese samples). Finally everything was at hand, we worked through some logistics details, like what to do with the back-up supply of frozen ice cream and determining if we would have easy enough access to it when the show was in full swing. Finally, we had everything in order and set out back to the hotel to reconnect with our retail visit colleagues for a joint dinner.
 
With all of together for dinner and nothing further on the day’s schedule we are able to get to know one another better and to have wide-ranging conversation about each other’s business and the various issues confronting the members of our team. The food and conversation were excellent and the team is primed and ready to face the thousands of visitors that will descend on our booth beginning tomorrow morning just after 9:00am.
 
We’re ready to go!   

​Although our meeting with the officials of the Plant Protection Division (PPD) of the Vietnamese Department of Agriculture was held on Friday the 13th , the meeting turned out to be one of the most productive and potentially successful ever. While the issue at stake, receiving approval from the Vietnamese Government for access to the Vietnamese market for fresh blueberries from America, has been the goal of the Blueberry Commission for more than 5 years, it has begun to appear that the granting of this access has been getting closer and closer. We did not receive any confirmation that access would be granted, but it does seem that we may be in the final stretch for the finish line. There are several additional steps that will be required before the market here will be open to us, but the signs are very positive. We are hopeful that access could be granted sometime in 2018. We left the PPD offices feeling very confident.
 
The remainder of our last working day of the blueberry trade mission was filled with additional visits to two potential importers and customers for Oregon blueberries. In both cases, the companies were owned and operated by a new generation of Vietnamese business people. Young (probably under 40), well spoken and fluent in English, comfortable with technology, which they incorporate into their business models.
 
The stores we visited were located on busy streets in busy neighborhoods. They were clean and bright with numerous refrigerated cases of beautifully packed fresh fruit of many different types. Signage was bright and full of messages about the healthy characteristics of the fruit, with plenty of lively artwork. The owners were all very enthusiastic about the possibility of introducing a large new source of blueberries and they all indicated that there was plenty of demand from customers. Access and customers, what more could we ask for!
 
It would be hard to imagine a more positive conclusion to our visit than this final business day. Our group will be heading home over the weekend and I will spend a few days in Hanoi as a bridge between the now concluded blueberry mission and the upcoming Trade Show in Singapore together with the Oregon Dairy Council. I’ll continue this series of blogs from Singapore, beginning on April 21st .     

​Our early Wednesday morning flight from Manila to Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) was uneventful and we hit the ground running. After checking in at our hotel, we used a meeting room to hold discussions with a local HCMC logistics company, that is expanding their business to hopefully include fresh fruit imports. We are familiar with them from previous visits to Vietnam and this is the firm that has imported Christmas trees from Oregon, which began in 2015. These conversations will be ongoing and clearly demonstrate the extremely important requirement to establish relationships with local companies and people. It takes a long time to gain the trust and respect of local business people, but it has been shown again and again to be a crucial component of creating a successful international program.
 
Our second meeting of the day was with the Foreign Agriculture Service (FAS) officer at the US Consulate in HCMC. We have worked with Gerald Smith in the past and he has been and continues to be an excellent contact for us on our visits to Vietnam. For me, tying the pieces of any project together is a key element to a successful project. In this case, I can say that I have a photo of the ‘Christmas Tree Lady’ and Gerald Smith at a local HCMC shopping mall decorating the first Oregon tree to arrive in Vietnam for Christmas 2015.
 
After a short break for lunch (all our breaks, when we get them, are short), we headed out once again, this time for a visit to a fresh fruit importer, packer and distributor.
 
The perishable nature of fresh fruit or produce adds an extra complication to the export/import supply chain. This is further complicated by the hot and humid weather typical throughout SE Asia for the entire year. The often novel and creative solutions applied to this problem are a constant source of surprise and admiration to me. Thus it was an eye-opener for me to visit this successful HCMC importer.
 
Needless to say, the products arrive from America and elsewhere either by ocean or airfreight in refrigerated shipping containers. These are then transported to local customers, typically in the original containers from the shipping line or airline, or in smaller local refrigerated trucks. Any extra handling always creates the potential for damage if the produce is outside its protective refrigeration. It is also important to note that many, if not most, local retailers are too small to receive a full container of product at one time. However, larger, commercial cold storage facilities are relatively rare, often located in semi-remote areas (away from retail outlets) and very expensive. Our host for the afternoon has found a very clever and practical solution. He purchased several used reefer containers from a shipping line (the markings were still visible) had them patched up and the reefer units repaired and had them permanently installed at his combination retail store, packing facility, long-term storage and distribution ‘warehouse’. Amazing!
 
Our group split up a bit for dinner: some of our colleagues, who had not been to HCMC went to the famous Rex Hotel – made famous during the Vietnam Was days as the HQ for US military officers and journalists. Others of went to a longtime favorite BBQ shrimp place a few minutes walk from our hotel. Great food, great conversation and a great conclusion to a busy day.
 
Another early morning flight brought us from HCMC to Hanoi, the capitol of Vietnam. We came straight from the airport to the hotel, changed clothes in two shared hotel rooms and made it to our meeting at the US Embassy with the Senior Officers of the FAS at the US Embassy Annex. We had an excellent meeting, the main subjects of which were to familiarize our colleagues new to Vietnam with details of the country’s demographics, politics and markets, and perhaps most importantly to prepare us for Friday’s meeting with Vietnam’s PPD – Plant Protection Department – the Vietnamese equivalent of our APHIS. This is a critical step in the development of our program to bring fresh Oregon blueberries to Vietnam. The process is moving towards its final steps and with the approval of the PPD, we will take a giant step towards the opening of this rapidly expanding market for products. We’re very hopeful and cautiously optimistic.
 
Finally we visited an amazing fresh fruit retailer and wholesaler, who has gone from one small Hanoi store to 39 stores across Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City in just a few years. The goal is 200 stores over the next 2-3 years. They use a combination of physical retail store and e-commerce with home delivery and presently have more than 200,000 registered customers. The owners are very keen on US fresh fruit, as are their customers, and they represent a highly motivated, experienced and professional potential customer with strong interest in Oregon and Washington blueberries. Can that grand opening be getting closer?
 
Stay tuned…