As I am sure many members will be aware Covid-19 has had a massive impact on the event calendar for the BFFF.

To date we have lost three events including our two flagship events of the Gala Dinner Dance and Product Awards Evening and the Annual Luncheon.

It is clear that it is not just the Federation that has been impacted by the pandemic. We are fully aware that many of our members have seen their businesses, and in many cases their livelihoods, decimated by Covid-19.

However, we are now trying to plan ahead into 2021 which we hope will be an environment that will allow physical meetings once again.

As I am sure you can understand it is difficult to plan with a hundred percent confidence, but I feel we need to at least provide members with a plan for the next calendar year, as follows:

Those of you that are BFFF stalwarts will notice some changes to the traditional BFFF programme.

The Business Conference has been pushed back into April in the hope that we can run as a physical event. We will also combine this with the ‘much delayed’ Product Awards for this year. We know many organisations have run product awards on-line, but we felt it was important to try to make this a physical event so that we can truly celebrate the amazing innovation in our industry.

This will mean that we will not run another Product Awards in 2021 but will bring the Product Awards back in 2022 and will capture products from 2021 and 2022.

New to our events calendar will be a media event hosted in May.  The aim of the event will be to present the short-listed products from the Product Awards 2020 to an invited audience of journalists, bloggers and influencers. This, whilst not open to members, will be a great opportunity to present the amazing products launched on to the market.

We are planning to run our annual Gala Dinner Dance in June, but this will no longer be at the Hilton on Park Lane. We are conscious that over the course of the last few years the venue has become very expensive and does not fit with today’s environment – especially so since Covid-19. However, we still feel it is important that the industry comes together to celebrate. We are planning that this will also be a celebration of some of the people in our industry. We are seeking a venue for this event and will announce this in due course.

We will finish the year off with the return of the Annual Luncheon which will remain at the London Hilton on Park Lane.

We also have one other project we are working on which will launch in January 2021 – this will be Frozen Food Annual Review for 2020. This will be a comprehensive review of the category covering sales, Covid-19 impact, waste, sustainability, consumer views on frozen and much more.

We hope you will agree this is an ambitious plan for the next calendar year.  We also wish to assure you that, given the uncertain future, we are taking all reasonable steps not only to ensure that we deliver this programme, but to be able to revert seamlessly to alternative means of delivery should that become necessary.