Food is Life at Gulfood Manufacturing

At Gulfood Manufacturing, Dubai, the biggest food show in Africa and the Middle East, we wanted food manufacturers to think creatively and differently about their manufacturing processes. So to break down barriers and to get people thinking about what’s really important about food, we introduced them to our ‘food wall’.  Visitors were simply asked to write what was most important about food to them:

We were genuinely amazed by the excitement and engagement. Over the three days of the show, 473 people signed the wall from 70 different countries. Writing in Arabic, Chinese, English, Filipino, Hebrew, Japanese, Swahili and Turkish to name a few, it really was a truly eclectic mix of global opinions on what’s important about food.

What we found?

Coming from the UK we were expecting people to write the commonly accepted important factors of food such as safety, quality, taste and flavour. These were key elements and many people from all over the world cited safety and taste as the most important areas to them.

But interestingly there was a real focus on the fundamental link between food and life. For instance “Food is life itself”, “Can’t live without food”, and “Africa needs more food.”

But should we have been surprised? Nestlé, the biggest food manufacturer in the world, has the slogan ‘Good Food, Good Life’, clearly linking food to life itself and it’s true to say that without food we wouldn't be here. But on a daily basis as engineers and food manufacturers do we make the connection between food and life in the UK?