Cofresh selling to supermarkets headlines Leicester Business Festival food and drink category

This year’s Leicester Business Festival, taking place between 23rd October and 3rd November will see leading food manufacturer, Cofresh, headline the Food and Drink sector with an exciting opportunity for smaller businesses to learn about how to break into the supermarket supply chain.

‘Selling to Supermarkets’ will take place on Monday 30th October from 5.30pm-7.30pm at the Cofresh headquarters in Leicester.

This one-time event staged as part of the Leicester Business Festival, is a unique chance for businesses with aspirations to become suppliers to the main supermarkets, to visit one of Leicester’s leading food manufacturers to learn how it is possible to break into this almost locked market.

The Leicester Business Festival sponsored by Leicester Castle Business School, is an annual, two-week ‘festival’ of free business events all put on by organisations from across Leicestershire, but open to absolutely anyone in the world to attend.

It was the first of its kind to be run in the UK and now in its third year, it is by far the largest business event in the region.

There are over 150 events taking place over the fortnight with everything from conferences, seminars, workshops, trade shows to exhibitions, award ceremonies and recruitment fairs.

Events are categorised into a number of sectors including Food & Drink, Marketing and Business Support, Professional Services, Sport and Health, Tourism and Hospitality, Creative Industries and many more.

Fay Davies, General Manager of the Food & Drink Forum is the Business Festival sector lead for Food and Drink. She said, "The Leicester Business Festival is a fantastic platform to showcase innovation across the sector but also to highlight the importance of ‘Food and Drink’ as a priority sector locally, regionally and nationally.

“It is the largest manufacturing sector in the UK, incorporating almost 7,000 companies who employ over 400,000 workers."

“Locally, the Food and Drink sector generates over £0.7 billion in GVA to the local economy and employs 11,000 people - almost 7% of the total labour force. It contains the area’s largest manufacturing industry, with a strong supply chains, clusters of excellence and long-established international brands contributing to a reputation for quality and excellence.

“Our central geographic location and excellent distribution access to national and international markets helps our Food and Drink businesses export the equivalent of £2.2 billion a year.”

There are a number of other superb events make up this popular Business Festival sector. These include food technical clinics, masterclasses about the laws surrounding safe food production; as well as debates about healthy snack food production as well as an interesting

All the events are completely free to attend but places must be booked in advance via the Business Festival website.

For more details and tickets, visit www.leicesterbusinessfestival.com.

Click here to see the full Leicester Business Festival Programme or click here to see all events in the Food & Drink sector.