Vandelis is a Belgian company specialized in food ingredients for industrial purposes. It is a small company that celebrated its 20th anniversary in March this year. We offer cocoa products, vegetable fats, chocolate for pastry and for chocolate chips, as well as dairy products and ingredients for production of chocolate, biscuits, and margarine. We don’t sell anything in Belgium, we only do exports and we started in North Africa, especially in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. To expand our sales market for chocolate and cocoa products, a couple of years ago we started shipments to Middle Eastern countries like Kuwait, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia. We have had one customer in Azerbaijan for the past 3 or 4 years, the "Azersun" company, and now we are trying to engage in this region more, looking to have more customers.
I checked the brochure of the exhibition to see which companies are present at this event to have found out that there are quite a few that make chocolate and biscuits, and I am going to check them out. For me, it is important to make a start by establishing contact, exchanging information to begin with. If I am able to do that, it would be wonderful, it would be a success to me definitely. Right now, I don’t have a clear idea, the full picture, and that’s why I am at this exhibition to see how this market works, what products sell well, etc. We know it is not really easy to enter the market of this region and Central Asia, I don’t know exactly why yet; may be also for the language barrier, and I am sure there are a lot of competitors as well, but we are just starting, so, it is going to take some time. We work B2B, so, we are interested in the companies that are either represented at this exhibition or are attending this event to find partners or feedstock suppliers, and this exhibition is a good platform for such purposes. Attended by companies and customers, it can play a very big and crucial role in marketing activity, and deriving from previous experience we are positive that this exhibition will give us a strong impetus for a good start, even though it is our first participation in this event. It has been surprisingly well organized, the organizers actively contacted us in preparation stages, sending us all information, leading us all along.
Rim Sassi. Sales Manager, Vandelis