By GREGORY ZELLER //
The future of New York State’s food and beverage industries spiced up FuzeHub’s latest manufacturing forum, held Thursday at Farmingdale State College.
Growth of the Urban Foodscape: A Food and Beverage Manufacturing Forum united stakeholders from across New York’s busy food-and-beverage scene – according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, New York boasts the second-most food-and-beverage manufacturing operations in the country (2,611), trailing only California – for cutting-edge economic development and old-fashioned networking, all flavored by New York’s most entrepreneurial edibles.
Technological innovations and job-creation strategies are prime cuts for FuzeHub, the statewide center for the New York Manufacturing Extension Partnership, which organized the manufacturing forum to support a crucial socioeconomic contributor “throughout New York State and specifically on Long Island,” according to FuzeHub Executive Director Elena Garuc.
“[The food-and-beverage industry] serves as a major source of employment, generating income for workers, farmers and communities,” Garuc noted. “Hosting an industry-specific manufacturing forum is our way to help generate even more economic activity.”
Cynthia Colón: One-stop resourcing.
The four-hour forum gave early-stage entrepreneurs, startups and small-to-midsized manufacturers from around the Long Island region access to university, government and private programs and services – everything from funding support to supply-chain guidance to “innovation assistance,” designed to help commercialize drawing-board ideas.
Among the organizations participating in the well-attended forum were the Long Island Food Council, Farmingdale State’s Small Business Development Center, the Empire State Division of Science, Technology and Innovation and the Manufacturing and Technology Resource Consortium at Stony Brook University.
Stony Brook MTRC Program Manager Cynthia Colón called the manufacturing forum “fantastic,” not only for strengthening an important economic cornerstone but for the breadth of services on display.
“We designed this for manufacturers to have all of these different resources together in one spot,” Colón told Innovate Long Island. “All of these companies are at a different stage of development, with different needs, and for all of them to be able to come and address their needs here was remarkable.
“Making different connections, seeing maybe there’s more than one way to solve a problem or more than one way a certain resource can help … that was really the goal,” she added. “And in that sense, it was a great success.
“[Food and beverage startups] leave with a folder filled with information, they leave with action items and they leave empowered to take the next step toward where they want to be.”
