The 2024 edition of the international packaging exhibition closed at the Sarit Centre in Nairobi. As many as twenty Italian companies producing and distributing machinery in the packaging, wrapping, bottling, and the entire container and packaging production chain participated.
A significant presence, within a large exhibition that saw 35 world nations represented and where the Italian pavilion, coordinated by the Italian Trade Agency, was given maximum prominence.
Our companies continue to bet, at a time when we look at Africa as an opportunity that is no longer 'predatory' but of interchange and common interests: you cannot enter the market of developing countries like Kenya, without believing in its potential and actively participating in its growth, starting with industrialisation. Better then if it is sustainable, as the continent itself is calling for in the appropriate fora and as we now have the tools (and interests) to do.

'The participation of so many companies is no surprise,' commented Ambassador Roberto Natali, inaugurating the Italian pavilion at the fair last Tuesday. 'Italian companies have long been world leaders in this sector. The most recent statistics on Kenya's imports in the packaging sector show comforting data in this regard: it is a market worth 35.4 million euro, with an annual growth rate of 13.5 per cent. In addition to the competence and quality of our company's production, I would like to point out a fundamental datum for doing business: courage.
And there are many 'courageous' companies that have presented their excellence in Nairobi, some of which are medium-small or family-run businesses that are approaching Africa for the first time and have decided to travel alongside 'sacred monsters' that have been present in Kenya for decades and have seen its development over time.

This is the case of Ballestra, a historic Milanese company, world leader in soap and detergent packaging machines, which since the 1980s has taken eighty per cent of this market, working with the most important local detergent and similar companies. Ballestra currently has 12 production plants in Kenya for soap and 'personal care', with a production capacity of 40 tonnes.    
"By now, Kenya is an industrialised country in its own right, with a leading technological capacity," explains Ballestra's manager for Sub-Saharan Africa, Mirco Camilletti.
Like Ballestra, for many years in the African country there are Cavanna, a company from Bologna specialising in packaging for flour and sweets, and Goglio, which has always supplied major coffee and macadamia packaging companies and has worked with Del Monte for years. There is Tecnopack, a dynamic group from Vicenza with 450 employees, and the Parma-based Akomag, which deals with plastic bottles with high-quality cleaning and reuse machinery. "We have been working very well with Kenya for more than ten years, it is a market that gives satisfaction and results," admits Foreign Salesman Mattia Spotti.

To understand how much our industry reaches Africa even where we don't know it, and how we have it at our fingertips and in our eyes every day, we need only think that a large proportion of the bread we see in supermarkets (from hamburgers to to loaves of bread and boxed bread) are produced by the machinery of the Sottoriva company of Marano Vicentino, which has been operating in Kenya for more than twenty years, and that coffee and tea sachets, and single-serving 'stickpacks' arrive thanks to Universal Pack of San Giovanni in Marignano, in the province of Rimini.
As for water, the most important company in the country, the popular Keringet, uses Italian machinery to produce and fill its bottles, that of the Bardi company of Fidenza.
The caps of water bottles and almost all beverages have been produced for over 20 years by machines from Sacmi in Imola, one of the most important Italian companies in the sector, a company with 5000 employees. Still talking about bottling and the like, another ten smaller companies are represented by the Afropack group, which offers and distributes their machinery in East Africa.

Among those who have bravely approached Kenya for the first time are Maspack from Asti, which manufactures bottling machinery for cans, glass and plastic, and Altopack from Tuscany, which is already in Tanzania with pasta, food and pet food packaging plants and won the Packaging Oscar in 2023, the Parma-based Fipal, a family-run company that manufactures complete systems for beverages, food, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, with a respectable pedigree that looks to Africa to expand, and Cimec of Nizza Monferrato, which facilitates the production of everything that revolves around a bottle, even a glass one, including labelling. Interesting is the proposal of the small company Ecopack, specialised in packaging for sweets, but above all in eco-sustainable machinery.
Finally, there are those who, comforted by the good data from the post-Covid recovery in Kenya, want to broaden their horizons: PFM of Schio makes biscuits and other foodstuffs and already has plants in the country, Tropical Food produces machines for processing juices and is already working with local companies, IPI of Perugia has been making aseptic cartons for juices and beverages for 40 years, and Pietribiasi has brought two other companies (Frautech and MikyLab) into the Milk Ita Group to present the best of machinery for packaging milk and dairy products, SIAD from Bergamo offers compressors for bottle filling, another company from Bergamo, SMI, deals with the entire production chain for bottling and packaging beverages, and Galdi from Treviso ranges from eggs to wine and other carton packaging with large, state-of-the-art machines.

The Italian pavilion, organised by the ITA office in Nairobi, beyond the logic and commercial results at short notice, appeared to be a demonstration of how our companies must be able to dare and propose themselves in the Kenyan market, for the good of both realities, on the one hand the consolidation of our history of quality and excellence, on the other the growth of a young country ready for the big leap, in a period of a limping economy but with good chances of getting back on track, on both sides.
ITA's director in Nairobi, Giuseppe Manenti, confirms the bilateral efforts and future possibilities, in several sectors.
"This fair also confirms our collaboration with the Kenya Manufacturing Association (Kam), with whom we are developing a common path to support Italian exports and the technological innovation of local production."