ProFound conducted a series of regional conferences for CBI’s natural ingredients project to follow-up on earlier strategic conferences held in December 2014. The first conferences focused on export development; the second series of conferences took one step further by looking at export promotion, e.g. developing the right product for the right market, supported by the right promotion and marketing mix. Of course, research is vital to such efforts. As such, the conferences not only brought together companies and public sector officials from key departments at local and national level, but also brought in researchers from universities and research institutes with research programmes of relevance to the national ingredients sector.
The outcomes of the strategic conferences were used to come to a regional export strategy. A later conference, provisionally planned for September 2015, will bring these regional outcomes together to come to a national export strategy for the sector.