Eyewitness

From May 19 to 23... five days spent at the fair, rushing from one event to another, from one meeting to the next and, in between, many fortuitous encounters with greater or lesser known people, with chats about widely known as well as surprising facts. Precious little time at my own stand, with the regret of having missed a few excellent opportunities to better understand the state of the world of packaging. That’s how I experienced the Milanese fair that combined Ipack-Ima with Converflex, as well as the new vertical events Meat-tech and Dairytech, and Intralogistica and Fruit Innovation, the latter two also in their first edition.

Many asked about the sentiment among exhibitors… my estimate of the flows of visitors… the overall quality of the offer… in a word, all that they would want to know in order to schedule their next visit, or even to plan their concern’s presence at the next edition of the fair.
Sincerely then, though skipping a few things, this is what I actually registered at the fair.

Visitors. The simultaneous offer of multiple events certainly fostered a high attendance of sector operators, who were presented with a rather elaborate panorama of products and solutions.
I would say, then, that the number of visitors at the fair was satisfactory on the whole, especially considering – as one has needed to for years now – that casual visitors’ numbers have dwindled, and that (this time we can affirm as much without mincing words) the Italians also turned out, in order to start up new investments and new projects. There was an impressive number of foreign delegations (about 500 buyers, 270 of which hosted by the incoming program funded by the Italian Ministry of Economic Development), with a very good level of participants, selected in part on recommendation of the exhibitors themselves. The event’s proximity to Expo 2015 probably worked as good advertising, especially for visitors from abroad.
It’s worth insisting on the effort of the organizers to manage visitor flows as efficiently as possible, with many visitors taking the metro or trains to arrive at the fair, so that many of them were concentrated in and around the East entrance, near pavilions 1-3 and 2-4. To compensate for this, anyone who arrived through other entrances was directed to pavilion 14 at the opposite end of the fair space.
A very handy Catalog/Pocket Guide was freely distributed to all visitors, with general info on the six events, including an events calendar and detailed information on the approximately 1800 exhibitors.

Events. Plenty to say the least. We counted approximately 200, enough to enter a hall the first day and exit the last day without having set foot on the fairground. In fact, the organizers - Ipack-Ima and Centrexpo, but also Deutsche Messe and Fiera Milano, among others - promoted a very limited number of events themselves, but the overlap of so many thematic areas and so many leaders from different sectors made for a critical mass of opportunities for discussions and information sharing.
The value of the contents and promotional activities certainly made the difference, and in this we also played a hand. Indeed, together with Istituto Italiano Imballaggio and Politecnico di Milano, we presented the Ethical Packaging Charter, to our satisfaction arousing interest and winning new signatories, and not just among sector specialists, but also among consumer representatives. I would like to add: for years organizers have made a fuss over rounding out their events with contents, hoping to attract more visitors (of course more is always better than less).

Personally, I’m convinced that, in spite of major socio-economic changes, and the cultural shift produced by new media, people continue to have a need to look one another in the eye, to shake hands, to have direct contact with the person with whom they are dealing, to ask questions and have them answered on the spot. I can attest to successful deals following an encounter at a fair, lubricated by small talk and a glass of wine, far outstripping any product specifications, carefully ordered and presented online only to be quietly ignored. In other words, the piazza, the market square… (see Coop’s supermarket of the future at Expo, ItaliaImballaggio 4/2015) remains a fundamental space, granted one that can still be reinvented, but nonetheless vital and irreplaceable. Just like fairs.

Exhibitors. An accurate assessment of the impressions of hundreds of enterprises at a fair with small and large stands is nearly impossible to achieve. I gathered enthusiastic impressions at one stand only to receive feedback of an entirely different tone at the neighboring one.
And so… my general impression is of the sharply varying levels of engagement concerns dedicated in promoting their own participation at the fair, with the obvious finding that “who did more, gleaned more”. This seems to be the most plausible lens through which to read exhibitors’ spirits at the event, albeit by no means an exhaustive one.
After all, the active engagement and involvement of concerns participating at a fair also leads to the drawing of significant attention from the organizers, who attribute to certain foreign representatives (read: East Asian concerns) this very ‘cultural’ deficiency, to the point of justifying their marginalization. But this was not the case.

As for the expectations packaging machinery and materials producers, see the survey we published in the 5/2015 issue of ItaliaImballaggio. But as far as I could gather from what exhibitors had to say in person, positive feelings clearly outweighed any grumbling.
But a few distinctions should be made… by event. At Converflex, we can say that we encountered general satisfaction with the coordination with Ipack-Ima. This proved a net recovery compared to the 2013 appointment, held alongside Grafitalia, proof that converting and graphics have now embarked on separate paths.
Ipack-Ima took the lion’s share in exhibitors and square meters, which grew slightly over 2012 values. In addition to the outstanding presence of the grain-based food sector, the impressive mix of products on show is also worth noting: many machine builders, although some beloved Ucima members were missing, as well as a significant presence of components -, materials and packaging manufacturers, both in absolute numbers and in variety, with a few leading converters too.
As for the quality of the foreign and Italian visitors (in terms of their authority to make decisions and spend money), there were a few comments shot through with cautious skepticism, but mostly satisfaction ranging from moderate to extreme.

To conclude this overview, I’ll mention the 2015 startups: Ipack-Ima’s two vertical events Meat-Tech and Dairytech, Intralogistica Italia (organized by Deutsche Messe) and Fruit Innovation (resulting from a collaboration between Ipack-Ima and Fiera Milano). Bother being premier events, it is therefore all the more difficult to assess the sentiments of the exhibitors. In fact, in such cases, what proved decisive were the expectations of the individual participants, which translated into heterogeneous if not outright contradictory opinions.

So that’s the long and the short of it. I have had my say now you have yours.
I await your comments here below.