ceo blog

As the Western Hemisphere’s largest and most comprehensive baking event, I’m amazed at the ongoing advances in marketing and sales assistance provided by IBIE, and the 2022 show is shaping up to be no exception. Keep reading to learn about the best ways to represent your company’s brand at IBIE 2022!

This year BEMA enters the second year of its current strategic plan. The three-year plan, launched in 2021, establishes a long-term trajectory for our organization.

Since the last IBIE, our industry and the world have been through incredible, unimaginable changes. Coming through the past two years, the industry has been lucky to always have the shining beacon of IBIE ahead in 2022.

These days, there’s plenty to talk about, and the laundry list the industry continues to deal with grows longer still. Manufacturers and suppliers alike are starting each day with some very big, looming questions of automation, supply chain, and staffing as they also navigate ongoing COVID precautions and the long-term implications and questions about vaccine mandates and testing.

This year’s Labor Day holiday offered a grateful comparison to acknowledge our progress over the past year and a moment to pause amid the whirlwind of the past eight months of 2021. The holiday also served as a reminder of just how far we’ve come thanks to the efforts of the nearly 800,000 baking industry workers.

We’re living in a time where there are many places to find information, yet it’s hard to know if the time spent searching is time well spent. With an abundance of resources available, how does one keep up with it all, especially as we look for ways to keep our lives and our businesses informed and moving forward?

Another BEMA Convention is in the books and after 15 months of virtual connection overload, it was great to be back in person. One attendee observed that the connections, information and sharing that look place over the four days of Convention would take months to replicate in the virtual environment.

If 2020 was a year of introspection, why can’t 2021 be the year for connectivity and looking beyond? Over the past year or so, we’ve seen countless examples of just how interconnected our industry is, from collaborations between customers and suppliers to navigating the log-jams of supply chain logistics holding up shipments coming from Asia and closer to home.

Last year around this time, we made the incredibly difficult decision to cancel our in-person Convention. While this was disappointing, the action quickly catapulted BEMA into a new mindset as we looked for innovative ways to overcome pandemic-related restrictions in order to provide meaningful engagement and education when our members needed it most.

Back in January, BEMA introduced its 2021-2023 Strategic Plan. Our Alliances and Partnerships focus, the third of our four-pillar strategic plan, offers a collective opportunity to define industry needs as well as provide our baker partners and supplier members with a platform to refine what the baking industry could look like in the future.