AAT at IFFA 2016

AAT-FREEZING decided to create a completely new and fresh presentation for this year’s IFFA, the international trade fair for the meat trade in Frankfurt, with the aim of repositioning the products on the market.

Several months of preparations paid off and our designer Standform from Salzburg conjured up a fantastic new stand in Hall 9.1. Visitors, business partners and established customers alike were impressed by the presentation. Compared to the previous fair in 2013, the number of visitors to the AAT-FREEZING stand and the number of inquiries increased several times over. Except for the traditionally quieter last day of the fair our staff at the stand hardly had a fee moment. Sometimes the visitors had to wait in line or arrange a later appointment to talk to us in person. Many of the visitors who had specific queries were astonished that we were able to give them written offers to take home. “We did everything possible to cut our reaction time for BoxFreezer inquiries to the minimum,” explains Martin Kink, head of department at AAT-FREEZING. “This took weeks of work but the results will serve us well in the future.” And he goes on, “What we want to achieve is being able to respond rapidly to even complex inquiries, for example where we need to include conveyor systems in the offer. Fortunately, our design engineers are so good that they can do this.”

Visitors were especially interested in the Small BoxFreezer, which we are now promoting as a way of expanding in the market for smaller production volumes (1 to 6 tonnes per hour). There is strong demand for units of this size above all in the American market. We have already issued our first offers for these projects. For the BoxFreezer we already acquired orders for four new projects in France, Spain, Poland and Thailand. We have already visited two of these factories and we expect the orders to be placed before the end of the year. “Of course we know from experience that customers’ timelines often slip a bit, but we will be happy and ready to deliver whenever they get back to us,” say the managers at AAT-FREEZING.

With 63,000 visitors from 143 countries, this year‘s IFFA closed with 5% more visitors than in 2013. We could see that the new, more professional and attractive presentation was making our competitors a little bit nervous.