Freshfel focus on food services

Freshfel's Wholesale and Distribution Division dedicated on 18 September a complete session to discuss future developments of food services and its implication for the fruit and vegetables sector. The session reunited members, as well as non-members representatives from modern restaurants and contract catering.

Demografic changes, modification of eating habits, new working patterns, and change of household structure lead to services in Europe rerepresent today 60 billions meals out from a total 340 billons meals per year. On average, each European takes 130 meals away from home per year, which represents 3% of GDP.

This constitues an opportunity for the Fresh Produce sector, which today is underscoring in all aspects of consumption away from home. Participants have addressed the problem of the failure to take full benefit of a fast-growing segment such as food services and suggested a number of measures to tackle these insufficiencies:

• To reflect on tools to secure supply of produce considering important factors such as freshness, diversified varieties, consistency of taste and convenience;
• To undertake a discussion across the chain with food service partners to facilitate mutual understanding and convince customers and consumers of the benefit of alternative healthy options;
• Specific logistics requirements of food services should also be considered;
• To analyse and modify the regulatory framework to better take into account fresh produce in the tendering system;
• Action towards younger consumers, in particular in school canteens and lunch boxes.

To build further progress in this area, Freshfel will coordinate a number of technical meetings with European counterparts such as EMRA (European Modern Restaurants Association) and FERCO (European Federation for Contracting Catering).

See the Freshfel website for more information.