Soon on a shelf near you – products from East Africa!

After five intensive days full of meetings, information, contacts and potential business the seven exporters from Kenya and Uganda made their way back home. Rather than exposing the products and potential business at one of the Scandinavian trade fairs the group together with CTS and Virke travelled to the buyers. This turned out to be a successful strategy. As you can tell by the headline our expectation after a week of good meetings is that the products will end up in the Swedish and Norwegian grocery stores. The exporters represented goods such as avocado, passion fruit, all kinds of fresh beans, pineapple, all kinds of dried fruits and many other vegetables and fresh fruit. It is not easy getting into the Scandinavian market and the requirements are high both on quality, quantity and on at least a minimum level of certifications such as the Global Gap. To be able to get the quantities to be interesting for the Scandinavian and European markets the exporters not only have their own farms.  They also work with about 4000 smallholders and out growers. More about the Swedish market for foodstuffs can be found in the CTS market guide which is available here: http://chambertradesweden.se/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/FOOD-Market-Report-Sweden-2013.pdf. The program was initiated and implemented in cooperation between Chamber Trade Sweden (CTS), African Women Agribusiness Network East Africa (AWAN-EA) and the Norwegian Federation of Enterprise (Virke).

If you are interested in learning more you can contact sofie.wikander@chambertrade.se