Food Machinery: Segments and Markets with Highest Export Potential

The 2024 final data on world trade flows, available in the ExportPlanning Ulisse Datamart, confirmed the high dynamism of international sales of Food Machinery¹: last year, world trade in the sector reached a new historic high (33.8 billion euros), at levels approximately 27 percent higher than pre-pandemic levels².

With the recent update of the Market Selection-ExportPlanning tool, a new product-specific indicator called “Import Development Stage” has been introduced, which is able to classify each country in one of the three phases of the import life cycle of a specific product: Latency, Growth and Saturation³.
This indicator is particularly useful for companies that are interested in expanding, diversifying and optimizing their export destinations, as it allows them to identify those markets in which the imports of a given product are in a phase of structural growth.

The table below highlights the most relevant segments of the Food Machinery sector that present the greatest number of markets in the phase of Import Growth.

Food Machinery:
Number of Growing Markets and their Value of Imports

Above all, the case of machinery and equipment for the industrial preparation of fruit and vegetables⁴ stands out, which presents as many as 32 international markets in the Growth phase for a total associated value of 142 million euros of imports.
In particular, as highlighted in the graph below, a driving market for the growth of the segment in question is the Indian one, whose imports of machinery and equipment for the industrial preparation of fruit and vegetables reached an absolute maximum point last year (54.7 million euros), with a growth rate in the last decade of 21 percent average per year in euro values.

Other segments with a high number of international markets in the Growth phase and a significant associated total value of imports are those of:

• machinery and equipment for the extraction or preparation of oils: 27 markets in the Growth phase⁴, for an associated value of 183.5 million euros;
• machinery for the industrial processing of meat: 20 markets in the Growth phase⁵, for an associated value of 265.4 million euros;
• machinery and apparatus for mixing and kneading: 18 markets in the Growth phase⁶, for an associated value of 506.6 million euros;
• bakery machinery: 18 markets in Growth phase⁷, for an associated value of 224.6 million euros;
• machinery for the manufacture of sugar and confectionery products: 18 markets in the Growth phase⁸, for an associated value of 76.6 million euros;
• other food machinery⁹: 18 markets in the Growth phase¹⁰, for an associated value of 133.8 million euros.

Last but not least, it is worth highlighting the cases of the markets of Indonesia and Qatar, in the Growth phase in the segment machinery or plant for the treatment of materials by a process involving a change of temperature, with 2024 imports of 475.2 and 148.1 million euros respectively. euro and an average annual growth rate over the last decade of +13.1 and 61.7 percent respectively.

Conclusions

The use of the Import Development Stage indicator can help highlight the greatest opportunities for exports of a particular sector, at segment and market level.
In particular, the usefulness of this indicator is evident in identifying the most dynamic components in terms of product segments, i.e. those characterized by a significant number of markets in the Growth phase, and the related most relevant Growth markets in terms of import value.