COPENHAGEN: China’s demand for organic products is also on a rise and Danish food producers have a high-level trust in doing business with Chinese counterparts, a Danish food business leader said here in a recent interview with media.
“We are seeing a growing concern among families, middle-class families demanding safe products, healthy products, and products which have an environmentally friendly production method,” said Lise Walbom, CEO of Food Nation, the official Danish consortium for promoting products, solutions and competences from the Danish food cluster.
“This is why we can also see that the demand for Danish organic produce is also on a rise in China,” Walbom told media.
International decision-makers attach great importance to the country of origin, Walbom said.
Food Nation recently conducted a survey via Danish pollsters over 1,229 international decision-makers in six of Denmark’s most important export markets about their views on Danish food products and solutions, including China, finding that most Chinese decision-makers pay close attention to the country of origin of products.
“We can see that 80 percent of the Chinese decision-makers saw it as a very, very important factor that they know where products and solutions come from,” said Walbom.
“This, therefore, makes it really important to us to know that we have such a high level of trust in doing business with our Chinese counterparts,” she said.
A further finding in the survey report was a growing tendency across all markets towards a stronger focus on sustainability that was anticipated to become an even more important business driver in the future.
“Sustainability is becoming increasingly crucial for professional buyers around the world as there is a need to produce more with less, while focusing on the environment, nature, and climate,” said Walbom.
“So we have to create a better future, a more sustainable future, and agriculture and food production play a really important role in taking the next steps and reaching that,” she said.
Denmark led the world in implementing national legislation on organic food production in 1987.
The state-controlled “ecology-label” confirms that the whole food chain from farmer to consumer complies with organic regulations.
From January to July, the largest growth in Danish exports to China was in pork and pharmaceutical products which amounted to 3.47 billion U.S. dollars with a year-on-year growth of 24.8 percent, according to the data released by Statistics Denmark on Sept. 8.–Agencies
