A Taste of Wellness for Savoury and Snacks
Givaudan
It is also calling on authorities to streamline and reinforce actions that will help small companies develop, create new jobs and fully exploit their innovative capabilities.
Competitiveness and enabling innovation have been hot topics this year, and the European Commission has formed a new high level group to establish a set of recommendations to achieve a predictable and stable framework to allow company developments.
"CIAA welcomes the European Commission's commitment to SMEs," said Jean Martin, president of the CIAA.
"However, these initiatives have to lead to concrete results and this is how we will measure their success. It will be most important to develop a holistic and integrated food policy that focuses on the needs and role of the sector as a whole and SMEs in particular."
The competitiveness of Europe's food industry continues to be weak compared to the US and Canada, and is at a similar level to Australia's and Brazil's, according to the Commission's report, Competitiveness of the European Food Industry: An economic and legal assessment.
It said this is a continuing challenge facing the EU food industry, despite it being the largest exporter and importer of food products and including a fair number of world leading food enterprises.
The industry has an annual turnover in excess of €800bn, is made up of more than 280,000 companies, and provides jobs for 4m people
Challenges facing SMEs
The food and drink industry is extremely fragmented, consisting of 280,000 SMEs, which represent more than 99 per cent of the industry and generate about half the sector's revenues.
The report by the CIAA in 2007 found that the food industry is performing below average in nine out of 12 innovation indicators, and is ranked 15th out of 19 sectors for innovation. The top three innovative member states in food products are Belgium, Sweden and France.
According to the CIAA, one of the main problems faced by SMEs in achieving successful growth is the cost barriers.
This includes the administrative burden of complying with EU legislation. It said the cost is relatively higher for SMEs than for large companies, and so there is a need for a more flexible, business-friendly framework that considers the capacities smaller companies have.
There are also the cost concerns arising from increasing raw material costs and supply problems. The CIAA said access to competitive raw materials must be ensured.
Additionally, small businesses have fewer resources to invest in R&D or to participate in joint research projects. The CIAA is calling for easy ways to transfer knowledge as well as to increase access to EU funding, training, networking and partnerships.
Other obstacles smaller companies face in developing innovation is the challenge of finding export markets, because of the significant investment required, and relationships with retail outlets and late payments.
Conference
The conference will be attended by more than 150 participants from industry, public authorities and academia, who will discuss the different issues.
The results will be given to the Commission's high level group to provide policy recommendations.