AFRICA BREWING CONFERENCE 4th Edition
January, 2024
By CHARLES DAVU
Deputy plant Director UCB
What is the Africa Brewing conference all about?
VLB Berlin is a member’s association and was founded in Berlin in 1883. For over 140 years VLB has been working in the field of research, development and training for the brewing industry. The institute hold international seminars to allow companies and gurus in the brewing industry to meet and share ideas and breakthroughs in the sector. The Africa Brewing conference is one of the regional events that are held in Africa to assist in tackling brewing challenges in the Africa brewing industry. The 4th Africa Brewing Conference was held right here in Cameroon under the theme «challenges and solutions for the African brewing industry.» It covered a wide array of topics to enable brewing companies to be more competitive. We as UCB are proud to have been part of the conference. We opened our factory doors to the participants to tour our facilities as part of our contribution to the event and additionally served our high quality Kadji and K44 beers at the conference. Everyone had a taste of UCB, Cameroon quality and were impressed.
We have heard this was the 4th edition, can you tell us more about the 1st - 3rd edition?
The first Africa conference was held in Addis Ababa, the second one was in Maputo Mozambique and the 3rd one was held online due to limited mobility caused by corvid pandemic. How helpful is this to UCB? This gives a platform for UCB to interact with its key partners from equipment suppliers to raw and pack materials suppliers. The conference gives a platform for bench marking practices within the industry and networking opportunity. Latest innovations are shared and this allows UCB to forward look how our future facilities can be set up. What has been the main take out for this year edition and its implication on UCB? The theme for this year was «challenges and solutions for the African brewing industry.»
Can you describe other participants feedback towards UCB?
Participants who toured our facilities were super impressed by the state of our facilities from the water treatment plant, modern brew house and packaging lines. Everyone was impressed by the level of 5S and housekeeping in the factory. This is a rubber stamp of the good manufacturing practices we have set up in house and the benefits of our ISO certification. Everyone who took our products asked for more, the superior quality of our products stood out amongst the participants. Other participants were also impressed by the technical know how our people which goes to say we are up there in terms of human and capability development.
Any other interesting point you think you can share will be appreciated
After realizing the benefits of this professional association UCB technical leadership has registered UCB to be a member of the VLB-Berlin. This enables the organization to tap into the knowledge pool of VLB- Berlin and leverage this partnership to develop our human capital.