Today the Asia Fresh Expo started with a well attended opening ceremony given by Wang Rongjiang, President of China Vegetable Marketing Association, David Zhong, President of VNU Exhibitions Asia and Zhang Qingfeng Executive Vice President of the China Fruit Marketing Association. They all mentioned the importance of the fresh industry in China, and how fast it has been developing in the last few years. As Mr. Wang Rongjiang said, more national vegetable and fruit brands are coming up, and that is a good development for the Chinese fresh industry.
A lot of companies that participated in the exhibition today, were companies with products that are now in season in China, like watermelons, cherries, grapes, dates, passion fruit, blueberries and strawberries. There were many booths where you could taste the fruits, and the overall flavour of these fruits was sweet. Because most Chinese consumers prefer fruits with a sweet taste, so this is also taken more into account when producing new variety fruits.
For example, So Sweet, a company that just participated this exhibition for the first time, presented their yellow skinned passion fruit. While passion fruit always has a bitter flavour, the variety So Sweet sells is very sweet. It still maintained a little bit of the bitter taste, but the sweet flavour was leading. Besides passion fruit they were also selling very sweet apricots. They are very aware of the fact that Chinese consumers prefer sweet tasting fruits, and therefore their company name is also So Sweet, to emphasise this even more.
Apart from the booths, there was also an opportunity to join several lectures in the conference room. Here, different companies could shared their professional knowledge with the audience or present their new product that had just come on the market.
One conference was given about bananas, where different companies shared their knowledge. One of these companies was Fresh-Key, a datalogger company. During the lecture of Tina Sun, director of Fresh-key, she explained the importance of a well-controlled temperature environment when selling or transporting bananas. A too hot temperature can have very severe impact on the quality of bananas. Therefore, as Ms Tina Sun mentioned, a datalogger could be a great advantage for this product, since you can always check the temperature, anywhere at any time, and in this way control the temperature for maintaining a good quality banana.