Seven hours, engineered

The summit opens with the industry's case put directly to government: what India needs from policy to build the food factories its next decade requires.

Where hygiene stops being an operating cost and starts being a board-level decision — and what it costs when it isn't.

• How do you make the business case for hygienic investment to a board or family promoter?
• Where have you watched a cheap capex decision become an expensive operating reality?
• How does leadership build food-safety culture beyond posters on walls?
• What three questions should every promoter ask before signing off factory capex?

How a written requirement becomes a buildable specification — and who owns it once the line is running.

• What are auditors demanding today that they weren't five years ago?
• Which audit failures trace back to design decisions no quality team can fix later?
• Where should Quality sit at the design table of a new factory?
• What does the cost of quality look like against the cost of a recall?

Every exhibit partner introduced to the full hall — rapid, chaired introductions before the floor's busiest window.

The daily discipline: what it takes to run hygiene and uptime as one operation — not two departments fighting over the same shift.

• What are the biggest opex drains you can trace directly to how the factory was designed?
• How do you balance sanitation windows against production pressure?
• How do you build hygiene discipline in a 500-person shopfloor workforce?
• What should operations feed back into the next factory's design?

Hygienic design and project delivery at optimal capex — built right the first time, because the retrofit always costs triple.

• Where does hygienic design most often get value-engineered out of a project — and what does it cost later?
• How do you specify, select, and hold vendors to hygienic standards?
• What does first-time-right commissioning demand from the project team?
• How do you upgrade a running brownfield plant without stopping it?

The first FoodFactor Excellence Recognitions — honouring engineering and food-safety excellence on the factory floor. Independent jury; entry free.

What the four functions agreed on, where they disagreed — and the punch list the industry takes home.

The convener's close — and the IFFS 2028 date. First Friday of February, every year.