Mercabarna’s Training Area offers a wide variety of training courses to Food Unit businesses. The courses are aimed at both managers and employees, enabling them either to learn new skills or to update their knowledge and awareness of techniques and trends.

From September to June 2011, over 30 courses will be programmed in areas such as economic and financial management, management skills, food safety, languages, computer studies and so forth. The regular training sessions will be supplemented by new courses that will address other strategic aspects of business development.

Foreign trade, foodservice, the Internet...
Starting in October and as part of the Activation Plan for Catalonia’s food service cluster, Mercabarna and the Catalan Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Action will organise day-long symposiums - with talks, case studies, debates and discussions - for companies that supply the hospitality sector and the firms of the channel itself. The talks will focus on how to devise cooperative strategies amongst sector companies to enhance competitiveness; improve customer relations to make them more efficient; and develop new products, advanced logistics and marketing strategies to build greater customer loyalty.

Also in October, on the 20th to be exact, the day session “The Internet as a Tool for Boosting Marketing in Times of Economic Downturn” will take place. Organised by Mercabarna, its business associations and the Port of Barcelona, the event will reveal the secrets to making the most of the commercial possibilities afforded by the Net.

In November the Training Area and the Fruit and Vegetable Wholesalers’ Guild of Barcelona and Province (AGEM) will launch a foreign trade course to help businesses that wish to begin exporting their products.
Finally, and thanks to the enthusiastic response when it was first held, the course on packaging and commercial life will be given again. It will be taught under the auspices of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and explain how to apply new technologies in order to lengthen the life of food.

New edition of “Train in Mercabarna”
In September the new edition of the brochure “Fórmate en Mercabarna” (Train in Mercabarna) will be distributed to its companies, thus providing a complete list of the courses Mercabarna will be offering. A briefing session will also be held for precinct-based firms the same month.

More information is available by visiting:
www.mercabarna.com/servicios/formacion/cursos/ or by calling 93 556 34 56.