Australia’s food and beverage manufacturing industry came back together this week for foodpro 2026 at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, and after four days on Stand D49, the Reliable Australasia team is heading home with a full pipeline and a very clear message from the market.

Returning after a three-year break and running roughly 20 per cent larger than its 2023 edition, foodpro brought more than 400 exhibitors and thousands of industry professionals through the doors between 26 and 29 July. The show was officially opened by the Hon. Colin Brooks MP, Victorian Minister for Industry and Advanced Manufacturing, and ran alongside the AIFST26 Convention, AIP training sessions and the PIDA Awards Gala Dinner, making it one of the most concentrated gatherings of food science and manufacturing expertise the country has seen in years.

The instrument that stopped people mid-aisle

The clear standout on our stand was the Portable GCMS, and the reaction was almost always the same.

People stopped. They looked at it. And then they asked whether that was really the whole instrument.

Mass spectrometry has a reputation for being large, fixed and lab-bound. Watching visitor after visitor register the actual footprint of the Portable GCMS, and then work out what that means for on-site volatile analysis, was easily the most rewarding part of the week. The conversations moved very quickly from “is that it?” to “where could we put one?”

That shift matters. When analytical capability stops being something you send samples away for and starts being something you can run where the product is, the question changes from whether you can afford the testing to how fast you want the answer.

A pipeline worth working

Across four days the team came away with a strong list of qualified leads spanning food and beverage manufacturers, quality and QA teams, contract testing laboratories and technical decision makers from across Australia and New Zealand.

The recurring themes were consistent with what the show’s organisers flagged going in: manufacturers are under sustained pressure across compliance, food safety, traceability and cost, and they are actively looking for tools that shorten the distance between a question and a defensible result.

Universities and research: the connections we did not expect to be the highlight

One of the genuine surprises of the week was the depth of interest from the academic and research community.

With AIFST26 co-located in the same building, the show floor drew a steady flow of researchers, laboratory managers, technical leads and academics. The teams we spoke with spanned universities and research organisations across Australia and New Zealand, and their work covered everything from food science teaching laboratories to funded research programs in flavour chemistry, contamination screening and shelf life analysis.

Those conversations opened up applications for the Portable GCMS that sit well outside routine QC, including field sampling, teaching and demonstration use, and collaborative research where instrument portability changes what is practical to study.

We are following up on several of these directly, and we expect a number of them to develop into longer-term working relationships rather than single transactions.

What we are taking away

Three things stood out.

Portability is not a compromise, it is a capability. The market response was not “this is a smaller version of a real instrument.” It was “this lets us do something we could not do before.”

Food safety pressure is real and it is immediate. Regulatory change, export compliance and contamination risk came up in conversation after conversation, unprompted.

Research and industry are converging on the same problem. Universities and manufacturers were asking remarkably similar questions, just for different reasons.

Thank you

To everyone who stopped by Stand D49, asked a hard question, or picked the instrument up to see how heavy it actually was: thank you. Trade shows are a lot of standing up, and the quality of the conversations made every hour of it worthwhile.

Thank you also to the foodpro team at Diversified Communications Australia for an exceptionally well-run event, and to AIFST for a program that brought exactly the right people into the room.

If we met at the show, your follow up is on its way.

Did not make it to the show? Come and see it properly.

The show floor is a busy place, and four days is never enough time to give an instrument the attention it deserves.

If you want to see the Portable GCMS in action, get in touch and book a visit to our demo lab. You will get a hands-on walkthrough with our technical team, time to run through your own application, and a proper answer to the question of whether this fits your workflow. No show floor noise, no queue behind you.

Get in touch to arrange your demo lab visit.

Reliable Australasia. High performance mass spectrometry with genuine local ANZ support.