Victam Asia 2010: Fully booked floor space and programmes

Victam Asia, to be held at the Queen Sirikit National Convention Centre in Bangkok, Thailand has grown into a three-in-one event serving the animal feed and food industry. For next year’s event, to be held from 3 to 5 March 2010 additional halls had to be reserved to satisfy the demands of the exhibitors. “Fiaap Asia or Feed Ingredients & Additives Asia Pacific, as we used to call it, is a specialist event for ingredients and additives that are used in the formulation and manufacture of feeds for farm animals, aquaculture and pets,” explains Victam International general manager Henk van de Bunt. The trade show and conferences are co-located with Victam Asia and Grapas Asia.
  “Victam Asia is our longest running show in Asia and will be held for the tenth time next year,” Van de Bunt says. “It is primarily an exhibition for equipment, systems and technologies that are used to process animal feeds, for terrestrial as well aquatic animals.
  Recently however, we have included biomass within the profile as the technology used in producing biomass pellets is virtually the same as is used in the production of feed pellets.”
  Victam and Fiaap have already been established, but Grapas is new. What is Grapas? “Primarily it is an exhibition and conference that is looking at the processing and storage of grains. It covers a number of different industry sectors,” Van de Bunt says. Under the Grapas umbrella there are companies exhibiting that are active in rice & flour milling, industrial noodle & pasta production, breakfast cereal processing and extruded snack manufacturing. Despite the fact that these sectors mainly operate in the human food segment there are synergies to be found with the other exhibitions. Van de Bunt explains: “With Fiaap and Victam, visitors from the feed industry will find a range of feed ingredients and additives alongside an enormous selection of specialist equipment used to process, store and move safe and cost effective feeds for animals, including aquafeed and dry pet food.”

Synergy with Grapas
But what are the similarities with Grapas? “Grapas and Victam have in common that there are similarities between a feed mill and a flour mill, in fact originally the feed industry has emerged from the flour milling industry in the past. The waste from flour mills was fed to animals. Eventually this grew and developed into the sophisticated industry we now have.”
  It is really in the specialist milling section within a rice or flour mill that there is a large difference in the equipment,” Van de Bunt continues, “however much of the ancillary equipment and systems are virtually the same, for instance intake systems, storage facilities, conveyors, bagging systems etceteras.”
  Visitors will be able to see on some exhibition stands ranges of feed processing technology, rice and flour mills, noodle processing equipment, breakfast cereal production and more. Companies specialising in extrusion will be able to discuss aquafeed and dry pet food production as well as then turn to a different visitor and talk about extruded snack production. There will also be a large number of exhibitors displaying ranges of ancillary equipment used in both industry sectors. “There is even synergy between Grapas and Fiaap, as you will find manufacturers of ingredients for feed often produce specialist ingredients for human food including the industry sectors as mentioned before,” Van de Bunt says.

Stand alone sector: Biomass
Victam also recognises the increasingly important subject of biomass, meaning the processing of organic matter, which then can be successfully used as a source of alternative energy. “In the Asia-Pacific region there are many suitable sources of organic wastes and crops that can be utilised. This matter would then be processed and the final product would be biomass pellets suitable for power plants,” Van de Bunt says. Still there is some cross-over, since for pelleting biomass, modified pellet mills are used and storage and transport systems are similar to those in the feed industry.

Conferences
The three exhibitions are supported by specialist conferences and workshops. These are not organised by Victam but by independent specialist conference organisers (see Table 1) and require registration and payment. There will also be a series of technical presentations given by some of the exhibitors. These are free of charge and open to all registered visitors.
  Visitors to the Bangkok exhibition can register online by logging on to www.victam.com, complete the online form and visit all three shows on one badge, and it is completely free. At the Victam website additional information can found on travel and accommodation in Bangkok.
  Who visits the shows? “As exhibition organisers we aim to attract senior personnel to our shows, and not fill the aisles with thousands of visitors who are not really interested in the exhibits and who have no purchasing influence. For this reason we target audience through our advertising and marketing campaign throughout Asia and in Thailand,” Van de Bunt says.
  “Just to give you an indication of what might be expected: over 6,000 trade executives visited Fiaap and Victam Asia in 2008. These visitors came from all over the world, but primarily from south and southeast Asia. In fact there were visitors and conference delegates from 69 different countries.