Beverage industry recovered better from pandemic than food industry
The performance of Spanish companies dedicated to the manufacture of beverages was better in 2021 than that of the food industry, after having overcome the worst of the pandemic.
This is clear from the data in the latest report by the Cajamar Observatory on the Spanish agri-food sector in the European context.
Its director, Joaquín Maudos, explained to Efe that, once the most critical phase of covid has passed, there has been a recovery in the business fabric of the agri-food industry in European Union (EU) countries, especially in the manufacture of beverages.
The sixth edition of the Observatory shows that, of the total number of companies in the Spanish food industry, 83% are involved in food manufacturing and the remaining 16% in beverages.
“Although the loss of companies in the agri-food industry in Spain persists, this fall of 0.2 % (55 fewer companies) is far from that recorded in 2020 (-1.3 %, with 402 fewer companies),” said Maudos, who is also Professor of Economic Analysis at the University of Valencia and Deputy Director of the Valencian Institute of Economic Research (Ivie).
Maudos highlighted that behind this better performance is the growth of 0.6% of companies dedicated to the manufacture of beverages (28 companies), a sector that came from a destruction of its productive fabric of 6.6% in 2020.
In contrast, the food industry then lost 83 companies, a fall of 0.3 %, according to the expert, who pointed out that Spain was one of the six European countries in which the number of companies in the food industry in general fell.
In its latest economic report, the Spanish Federation of Food and Drink Industries (FIAB) states that the dynamics of the sector managed to remain above 30,000 companies in 2022 (30,159), 0.3 % less than in 2021.
