After entertaining millions of guests over a six-month period, EXPO 2020 drew to a close on 31st March 2022 with a poignant journey back through some of the most evocative and momentous EXPO 2020 moments. The legacy of EXPO 2020 certainly left thousands of those visitors with a ‘taste for Estonia’.

Following its immense popularity with both visitors and UAE residents during the exhibition, the EXPO Estonian Café, a partnership of Carmen Catering and ETS Nord, is set to open a permanent venue in Dubai in September 2022. The Café will use organic, clean, and natural ingredients, synonymous with Estonia, introducing an array of popular native flavours to the UAE community.

The Estonian Café served over 36,000 meals at EXPO2020.
The top-selling dish was the Generation Y Burger, of which 24,500+ were served. The beef burger was topped with truffle mayonnaise and onion jam and was a taste sensation success story of the Estonia pavilion with repeat customers and countless recommendations from all who sampled it.
In just 6 weeks, the café sold 460 meals per day, equating to 65 meals per hour.
The EXPO Estonian Café catered to over 30+ private receptions, offering authentic Estonian food to over 1,500 people.

ETS NORD also gained huge success as part of the EXPO Estonian Café providing ventilation and air cleaning systems, which has in turn given them visibility in the region with a warehouse and factory now being built in the UAE for their most advanced modular canopy systems. A gateway to the MENA market for ETS NORD, their ventilation solutions for commercial kitchens will be manufactured in accordance with the requirements of the HACCP food safety program.
The opportunities that EXPO has provided international brands to establish themselves in the local market are nothing short of ground-breaking and have laid a solid foundation for Enterprise Estonia in presenting the UAE as a leading export destination for food and beverage products.

After a hugely successful EXPO 2020 and presence at Gulfood 2022, Taste Estonia is going from strength to strength in the region educating the country on clean and sustainable produce. Estonia boasts the prestige of having the ‘cleanest food in the world’ according to the UN Food and Agriculture organisation, and excitingly, a selection of this healthy, natural, and organic produce is now available to purchase on UAE shores, with more to come in 2022.

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