Gulfood 2026: Positioning South African Pecans on the Global Stage

What is Gulfood?

Gulfood is one of the largest and most influential food and beverage trade exhibitions in the world. Hosted annually, Gulfood spans across 2 venues and multiple exhibition halls and brings together more t han 8,500 exhibitors from over 190 countries, attracting thousands of visitors. It serves as a key global platform for food trade, market development, and international networking.

SAPPA’s Focus at Gulfood

SAPPA’s primary focus at Gulfood was looking for opportunities to market the growing volume of Pecans from South Africa. The team made a deliberate effort to visit every pecan exhibitor at the show, engaging in discussions around sourcing, volumes, and market destinations, while consistently promoting the quality, timing and reliability of South African pecans.

In total, 36 exhibitors were selling pecans, of which 10 were from the USA, 16 from China, and the remainder from a range of other producing and trading countries. A significant number of Chinese exhibitors indicated that their pecans were sourced from South Africa, confirming South Africa’s strong footprint in global pecan supply chains. Product offerings ranged from raw and roasted kernels to flavoured pecans, in-shell products, and value-added snack formats, with overall quality being very good.

Broadening the Market Conversation

In addition to pecan exhibitors, SAPPA engaged with companies selling or using other tree nuts that can add pecans to their product portfolio. These discussions focused on the taste, health benefits, and versatility of pecans, while emphasising that South Africa produces premium-quality pecans and has rapidly growing production capacity, making it an attractive long-term supply partner.

These companies ranged from snack-nut suppliers to manufacturers using nuts as ingredients in ice cream, breakfast products, baked goods, and snack mixes.

Strategic Meetings and Industry Engagement

Numerous targeted meetings were arranged, including engagements with Indian dried fruit company, the International Nut and Dried Fruit Council (INC) networking event, Goodfood, La Nucalera, Pecan Star, and the American Pecan Council (APC), to name a few.

Discussions with the APC focused on strengthening collaboration and exploring future partnership opportunities. SAPPA also demonstrated a concept for a new global pecan data platform, aimed at enabling real-time data sharing between producing countries, including South Africa, the USA, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Australia, and China.

Exploring New Trade Opportunities

Another key objective was to assess the potential for shipping in-shell pecans to Mexico and the USA. Currently production in those regions declining rapidly and South African production increasing, this was identified as a key strategic opportunity for South Africa to become a trade partner with these established markets. These markets already have significant processing capacity, and South Africa’s harvest window aligns well with peak demand periods, including Thanksgiving. Feedback during these discussions suggested this could be a viable and mutually beneficial option.

Key Takeaways

Gulfood was exceptionally well organised and proved to be a highly effective platform for marketing Pecans from South Africa. We were impressed with the amount of pecans we saw across Dubai, from major retailers to cafés, bakeries, and ice-cream outlets, highlighted the growing global familiarity with and demand for pecans.

Overall, SAPPA left Gulfood confident that the event has the potential to be a strategic and valuable platform for positioning South African pecans in global markets and building long-term trade relationships.