Dear Sir/Madam,
On behalf of the President, Mr Thomas Nonn, we have the pleasure of inviting you to our General Assembly and Annual Conference that will take place as usual in the third week of March, i.e. on Wednesday 19 and Thursday 20 March 2025 in Bucharest.
ACDBR (Association of the Romanian Distribution Companies for Consumers Goods), our Romanian member association, kindly supports this event and has helped prepare an interesting programme.
- On Wednesday, all participants are first invited to have lunch. Then at 14.30 we will start the conference with two presentations on Romania (ACDBR + the evolution and trends in traditional Romanian trade). Political discussions around a joint Manifesto of Independent Retail Europe and ACDBR with local and EU politicians, and a panel discussion will follow, in presence of Ms Maria Grapini, Romanian Member of the European Parliament (S&D, Vice-Chair of the European Parliament’s IMCO Committee – Internal Market and Consumer Protection –, and member of the AGRI Committee – Agriculture and Rural Development), among others. Afterwards we will have a presentation of the Commission of the key activities of the Retail Unit of DG GROW (Directorate General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs). The General Assembly – participation is reserved to the leadership of the member organisations – will close the working programme of first day. In the evening, we are invited to dinner by ACDBR in a typical Romanian restaurant, the Hanu’ lui Manuc.
- On Thursday, the conference will re-start at 8.30. The first session will be dedicated to the reduction of Packaging and Packaging Waste and the second one to uses of Artificial Intelligence in retail. The last presentation of the day will be an entertaining keynote speech by Jack Stratten on innovative solutions in retail. We close the event with a networking lunch. As usual, the conference will end early enough to enable all participants to fly home in the afternoon, i.e. participants can book flights as of 16.30. We have foreseen a bus that will leave the hotel at 14.00 to bring the participants to the airport.
Please note that the programme on 19 March, except for the General Assembly, as well as the Annual Conference are open to external guests and to all staff members and members of your organisation. We invite you to extend this invitation to your colleagues, members and retailers in order to enable them to have fruitful and constructive exchanges with their foreign peers.
You will find here all the practical information (accommodation, costs). The registration form is available below. Participants are kindly requested to fill it out by Thursday 6 March. Should you need additional information, please contact Laurence (laurence.dessouroux@independentretaileurope.eu, +32 2 732 46 60).
We look forward to seeing you in Bucharest!
Kind regards,
Else GROEN, Director General