A Journey Begins with a First Step

Ole Rygh, Chairman, PMMI Show Committee, president and CEO, Ryson International

Despite taking over the Show Committee Chairmanship for PMMI at the beginning of the year, PACK EXPO East is my first event at the head of the table. I am happy to say that the second PACK EXPO East, and inaugural Healthcare Packaging and Processing Conference, lived up to the expectations established by our successful debut in 2015.

The show also represents the beginning of PMMI’s most ambitious year to date with three more events on the calendar from the PACK EXPO portfolio of trade shows. Next month at this time we will be putting the final touches on our exhibits at the inaugural ProFood Tech (April 4–6, 2017; McCormick Place, Chicago) – the most comprehensive food and beverage show in North America. Powered by three of the world’s trade show leaders – PACK EXPO, Anuga and the International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA) – ProFood Tech was launched to meet the demands of the growing food and beverage processing industry. Its origins are quite like PACK EXPO East and PACK EXPO Las Vegas; in that we saw voids in the Northeast and West Coast corridors and filled it with true packaging events.

Not only will ProFood Tech offer over 6,000 processing professionals access to 400-plus of the world’s top suppliers across 150,000 net square feet of exhibit floor, but attendees will also have access to both the ProMat and Automate events April 3–6 at McCormick Place. ProMat, sponsored by MHI, is North and South America’s premier material handling expo focusing on manufacturing and supply chain solutions and attracts over 40,000 attendees to 900 exhibits and over 100 complimentary educational sessions. Automate, organized by the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), is North America’s largest automation show, and attracts over 20,000 attendees.

Featuring robust educational programming, the ProFood Tech Conference Program, produced by IDFA, will offer a broad range of educational experiences covering issues such as regulations and food safety, consumer trends and marketing, food processing advances and technology, business and leadership development and health and lifestyle. The conference will kick-off with a keynote address by five-time National Football League (NFL) MVP Peyton Manning on Tuesday, April 4 at 8 a.m.

In addition, the ProFood Tech Learning Hub will house complimentary, 30-minute educational sessions at the Innovation Stage and the all-new Regulatory Matters Stage. Each Innovation Stage session highlights fresh looks from industry experts at breakthrough technologies and proven techniques while the Regulatory Matters Stage features presentations by industry experts followed by a roundtable discussion to share ideas and best practices on these critical topics.

In June, PMMI heads south of the border for a sold-out EXPO PACK Guadalajara 2017 (June 13–15, Expo Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico) unprecedented in size and scope. Three times the size of the previous iteration, nearly 2,200 square meters of the show’s 13,000 net square meters of trade floor space will house 82 exhibiting PMMI members in the PMMI Pavilion. This makes the pavilion almost five times the size of the EXPO PACK Guadalajara 2015 PMMI Pavilion.

After we complete our first three stops, the PACK EXPO caravan heads back to the U.S. for PACK EXPO Las Vegas and co-located Healthcare Packaging EXPO (Sept. 25 – 27, 2017, Las Vegas Convention Center). With over 2000 exhibiting companies, the largest packaging show in the Americas in 2017 will welcome 30,000 total attendees from 40-plus vertical markets. This includes 5,000-plus international buyers from more than 125 countries.

That is as formidable a trade show calendar as you will ever see an association undertake in just eight months. Fortunately, PMMI is just the group to take on this venture.

I look forward to seeing you there.