MOSCOW, July 25 The Russian fleet of food equipment needs to be restored to the level of the best foreign analogues, said FoodNet expert (Foodnet) of the National Technical Initiative (NTI) Olga Orlova.
She stated this at the last project -educational intensive «Archipelago 2024».
According to her, in the 90s, Russia practically lost the development and production of food equipment, that is, its own domestic fleet of equipment; before that, the country produced high-quality equipment, not inferior in quality to foreign ones. At the moment, due to the lack of good domestic equipment, innovative food companies are experiencing difficulties in production.
«There is very little Russian equipment that we would like to see meet all the requirements needed for production. And many manufacturers of innovative products, buying, say, Russian equipment, rework something, and they get what they want to see. This is probably also a problem. That is, I believe that in the 90s we lost our domestic fleet, equipment that was normal,» the NTI press service quotes Orlova as saying.
She recalled that after university she worked at a dairy factory, which had its own bakery and confectionery shop. “And I don’t remember anything working badly for us. Everything was there and working as it should, in normal and emergency mode. Restoring the Russian fleet of food equipment is one of the most important tasks in our country, to stop depending on the Chinese, to transport complex logistics systems European equipment and so on,” said Orlova.
She added that another main problem in scaling innovative food projects is retail chains that do not allow small companies to enter the market or charge a lot of money for it. Moreover, if a product enters the markets of Moscow, St. Petersburg and other million-plus cities, then there is immediately a demand for it and its scaling occurs.
«Archipelago» is an annual design and educational intensive for representatives of technology companies and startups, engineering teams, management teams of regions and universities, representatives of scientific organizations that develop projects in the field of new technologies. In 2024, “Archipelago” took place in the Sakhalin region from July 8 to July 21. The main venues for the event were the city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk and the Pushisty airfield.
The organizers of the intensive are the NTI Platform, the government of the Sakhalin region, the Agency for Strategic Initiatives (ASI), the NTI Project Support Fund and University 2035.
