How to Follow Up With International Buyers After Anuga

Anuga is a trade-only food fair in Cologne, held every two years. The next edition runs from 9 to 13 October 2027. What makes follow up after Anuga harder than after a regional show is not the number of contacts but their spread: a single evening’s notes can include a buyer in Santiago, a distributor in Lagos, an importer in Busan and a retailer in Rotterdam. One email template sent at 09:00 Cologne time reaches some of them in the middle of the night, in a language they read slowly, on a channel they rarely check.

This article is about adapting follow up to that spread. It assumes your leads are already captured and graded; if not, start with the Anuga 2027 lead management guide. For the general show plan (what to send on which day), the 30-day trade show follow up plan is the backbone. Below is what changes when the list is truly international and the product is food.

Split the list by region before you write anything

Before drafting a single message, add a region to every lead. Country is already on the record; region is the grouping you will schedule and write by. A practical split for a food exporter:

Time differences shift when clocks change, and they change on different dates in different countries, so check the buyer’s city rather than relying on the table. The point is the habit: every message is scheduled for the buyer’s working morning, not sent when you happen to finish typing.

Also check the buyer’s working week. Not every market works Monday to Friday, and a message that lands on a buyer’s weekend sits under everything that arrives on their first working day.

Choose the channel by what the buyer told you, then by region

The best guide to channel is the buyer’s own behaviour at the stand. If they handed you a card and said “email me the specs”, use email. If they took out their phone and said “send it on WhatsApp”, use WhatsApp. If you recorded nothing, regional habit is a reasonable fallback, as long as you treat it as a habit and not a rule; the common patterns are set out in WhatsApp vs email for export sales.

Whatever the first channel, keep documents on email. Specifications, certificates, quotations and proforma invoices get forwarded to quality, finance and logistics colleagues, and email threads are easier to forward and file. WhatsApp is better for short questions, confirmations and “did the samples arrive?”

WhatsApp rules that affect show follow up

If you message buyers through the WhatsApp Business Platform, two rules shape your plan:

• Permission. Ask at the stand whether you may contact them on WhatsApp, and note the answer. Messaging without it risks blocks and complaints.
• The 24-hour window. According to Meta’s pricing documentation, when a buyer messages you, a 24-hour customer service window opens, and free-form messages can only be sent while it is open. Outside it, only approved template messages can be sent. For a buyer you met at Anuga who has not written to you since, your first WhatsApp message will be a template, so get it written and approved before the show.

For a fuller comparison of the two channels, see WhatsApp vs email for export sales.

Write for buyers who read English as a second language

Most of your Anuga follow up will be in English, read by people for whom English is a working language rather than a first one. That changes how you write:

• Short sentences, one point each. “We can pack 10 kg cartons. MOQ is one 20 ft container.” beats a long sentence with three clauses.
• No idioms or jokes. “Ballpark figure”, “touch base” and “circle back” are confusing in translation tools.
• Unambiguous dates. Write “14 October 2027”, never 10/14/2027 or 14/10/2027.
• Clear numbers and units. Write “1,000 kg (1 metric tonne)”. Decimal commas and points differ between countries; when the number matters, spell out the unit.
• Name the Incoterm and the port. “CIF Jebel Ali” or “FOB Izmir”, not “delivered price”.
• Offer their language, do not fake it. If someone on your team speaks the buyer’s language, say so: “My colleague [Name] speaks Spanish if that is easier.” Machine-translated sales emails can read badly; a fluent colleague is better.

The first 72 hours after the show

The show closes on Wednesday 13 October 2027. Allow for buyers travelling home in the days after it, and aim to have every Grade A and B lead contacted by the end of Friday 15 October, scheduled for their morning.

The first message has three jobs: show you remember the conversation, give the product information, and confirm the next step you promised.

In a WhatsApp campaign only the buyer’s name changes from message to message, so write the product range into the template text (one version per product line if needed) and put the link in a button.

If the buyer gave you a business card but no clear interest, send the email only, and leave WhatsApp unless they agreed to it.

Answer spec and certificate requests completely

Food buyers rarely move to a price discussion before they have checked whether your product can legally and practically enter their market and their customer’s shelf. The first real reply from an Anuga buyer is often a document request. Answer it fully and quickly; a partial answer starts a slow back and forth.

If you do not hold something they ask for, say so plainly and say what you can offer instead. “We do not hold BRCGS. Our plant holds FSSC 22000, certificate attached” is a useful answer. Silence is not.

Plan sample shipments before you promise them

Samples are where many Anuga follow ups stall. A buyer asks for samples on day three of the show, the exporter agrees, and three weeks later the parcel is still not sent because nobody checked what the destination requires.

Before you promise samples, or at least before you ship them, confirm:

• The exact delivery address and a named recipient, with a phone number for the courier.
• Import requirements at destination. Some countries restrict food samples or require documents for them. Ask the buyer what their customs usually needs, and ask your courier what they need from you for that country.
• Quantity and format. Retail packs for a retailer’s tasting panel; a few kilograms from a production lot for a manufacturer’s lab.
• Who pays. Free samples, or courier on the buyer’s account. Agree it in writing.
• Product condition in transit. Chocolate, cheese and anything chilled needs a different plan from nuts or spices.
• Documents in the parcel. Spec sheet, COA if available, and a short note with your contact details.

When the parcel ships, tell the buyer, with the tracking number. When it is delivered, wait a few working days and then ask specific questions.

This message carries a date and product that differ for each buyer, so send it one to one from your WhatsApp Business app or phone, not as a campaign.

Quote on the terms the buyer actually buys on

A buyer in Rotterdam may want CIF Rotterdam with 30 days after arrival. A trader in Dubai may want FOB with TT advance. A retailer may want DAP to their warehouse. Before you quote, check your notes for the Incoterm and port they named at the stand; if you did not record one, ask.

A useful export quotation for food states the product and spec, pack, quantity per container, price per unit, currency, Incoterm and named place, payment terms (for example TT advance, LC at sight, or CAD), lead time from order confirmation, and validity. Validity matters for food: crop prices and freight move, and a quote without an end date invites a buyer to come back months later at the old price.

Keep it in the same email thread as your first message so the buyer sees the whole conversation in one place.

A follow up calendar for a mixed international list

Count days from the last day of the show. The spacing follows the general plan; the international part is when and how each message lands.

Stop as soon as a buyer replies; from then it is a conversation. Giving up after one message is a common way to lose a good lead, and so is writing ten times with nothing new to say; both appear in why exporters lose buyers after international trade shows.

How to do this in Double Export

Tag your Anuga buyers by region as well as by event and grade, for example Anuga 2027, Grade B and Region: Americas. Then create one campaign per region and channel, scheduled in a city’s time zone for that region, with sending days and hours that fit their working week. The buyer follow up page explains how WhatsApp and email work side by side; each campaign is one channel, so a buyer who gets both has two campaigns.

For WhatsApp, use WhatsApp sequences from your own WhatsApp Business number through the official Cloud API. Write the template in the app with a header image of your product, personalise it with the buyer’s first name, add a link button to your Product Sheet, preview it and submit it for approval well before the show. A sequence can have up to 10 steps, each 1 hour to 90 days after the previous one, and it stops automatically for a buyer who replies on WhatsApp. Buyers without WhatsApp permission or a number are left out.

For email, email sequences send from your own Gmail or Google Workspace mailboxes. A follow up without its own subject goes as a reply in the same thread. Double Export does not read your inbox, so when a buyer replies by email, stop the email sequence, and any WhatsApp sequence they are in, for that buyer from the campaign results.

Share specs as a Product Sheet with the certificates you tick, the Incoterm and named port, and a per-sheet price override if this market gets different pricing. You can see how many times the sheet was viewed and when; that count belongs to the sheet, so it tells you about one buyer only when the sheet was made for that buyer and linked to their record. For quotations, Double Export generates the quotation PDF from an export order at the Quoted stage, and you send it to the buyer by email. There is no automatic translation, so write in plain English or have a colleague write the language version. See pricing for the number of WhatsApp numbers and mailboxes on each plan, and the trade show lead management overview for the full show workflow.