The Australian Institute of Food and Science Technology (AIFST) and Food Innovation Australia Ltd (FIAL) have been working the past six months to develop a map of the Australian food industry (not including agriculture and retail).
The map will be split up into nine categories, including; associations, marketing, dairy services, equipment suppliers, ingredients, laboratory services and analytics, manufacturing, packing and packaging and training.
Visitor’s at this year’s AIFST Convention at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre (June 22-25) will be given the first opportunity to see and interact with the map at AIFST’s stand.
The map will then be released in Food Australia magazine on 1 August, and online shortly after.
It is designed to provide the industry with an interactive way of connecting, networking and reaching out to a widened availability of services.
Business development manager at AIFST & Food Australia, Stefan Worsley said the map is designed to “create more cohesion in the industry.”
“You can go on and search or filter, let’s say a dairy person in Victoria, they can click and say ‘I only want to see dairy and I only want to see Victoria’ and then it will put up all the points and they can click on these points to get to the address, name telephone number and website,” Worsley said.
Worsley said along with acting as a resource to find local producers, the map will encourage overseas trade as well.
“There are going to be people across Asia that can access this as well and they can hopefully source products from Australia. You’ve got this really precise information which has been researched the past six months. It’s more the usability of it, if you can search and filter; it makes it a lot quicker to to find the information.”