SIX Jamaican food distributors will attend the Foodex 2001 trade show in Tokyo, Japan next week, through the joint efforts of JAMPRO, and the Japanese Embassy.

The companies participating in the show include several coffee firms — Salada Foods, Jamaica Coffee Company, Coffee Industries and Jamaica Standard Products, as well as jerk food producer, Suntrax Enterprises, and Grace, Kennedy.

Foodex, the largest annual trade show in the Pacific Rim, affords buyers from hotels and restaurants, importers, distributors, and retailers to view food products from over 75 countries. Between 80,000 and 90,000 professional buyers attended the show over the last two years.

Last year over 5,000 professional buyers passed through the Jamaican booth, which included three Jamaican food distributors, with 172 companies expressing interest in some of the products.

“I think we made a breakthrough as one sample shipment of rum cream went to Japan,” said Neville Madden, JAMPRO’s marketing executive for the Far East.

Madden said the ship was only the “beginning of a process”, given that the shipment went to “the largest distributor of alcoholic beverages in the Osaka region of Japan”.

More recently a shipment of jerk meat was dispatched to a large food distributor in Japan and, according to Madden, there were plans to meet representatives of the company during Foodex 2001. Madden said the same company was interested in Jamaican sauces and condiments and that he was now in the process of arranging a sample shipment of pimento.

Madden said that while the Japanese were more interested in trade, the Chinese were keen on investing in infrastructure development such as roads, bridges and water systems.

He said Chinese investors also expressed an interest in hotels and cruise shipping, adding that their interest in apparel manufacturing has taken him by surprise given the trend in that sector.

“Right now Jamaica’s apparel quota to the USA is severely under-utilised. This is one of the main driving forces why Asian investors are showing interest in the local apparel manufacturing sector, a position further enhanced by the passing of the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) enhancement legislation last year,” Madden explained.

Madden said JAMPRO’s focus in China was on investment rather than trade, because a mission there last year found the market to be closed.

“Because China is a large country, intra-trading is a big business. So they do far more internal than external trading in terms of imports,” he said.