EPIA’s Financial Adjustments for 2019 & copyrights

1-The EPIA depends upon your financial support in order to provide a fertile platform for you to share ice industry ideas and strengthen relationships among ice men and women. Please remember membership dues are payable by the end of the first quarter of each year; 31 March 2019 for the current year. At this time of the year, it is appropriate to remind each member that late payment of dues carries a penalty of 25% of the amount of the annual membership dues. The penalty increases the dues for each category of membership with the penalty amount ranging from €112.50 to €237.50. Please respond in a timely manner to keep the EPIA financially capable to meet our obligations.

Over the past years we have found that a large number of convention attendees do not commit to attend until the last couple of weeks and sometimes last few days prior to the convention. This situation causes your convention committee and BoD to struggle to accurately project the convention attendance. Without an accurate projection, the EPIA lacks the assurance to commit EPIA funds to the host hotel and local providers of festivities supporting the annual convention. This has caused confusion, significant program adjustments, and even cancellations related to the convention program offerings in past conventions. To alleviate this financial jeopardy caused by late registration, your BoD has decided to encourage timely commitment for the 2019 convention. The convention fees for 2019 in Bilbao will be €394 for the first attendee and €356 for each subsequent attendee. If the convention fees are paid prior to 30 June 2019, the fees will discounted to €315 and €285 respectively for timely attendance commitments.

Other financial reminders include an adjustment to late year new member dues:

New members joining after 31 August will be obligated to 25% of the appropriate membership category annual dues amount for the joining year only. They will also qualify during the joining year for the payment of the discounted convention attendee fee amounts based upon timely attendance commitment.
Professional members who are individuals rather than larger companies will be obligated to annual dues of €450 as an Individual Professional Member subcategory of the Supplier Member category.If the new member is an Individual Professional Member joining after 31 August, they will also be charged only the late year joining prorated amount of 25% of the annual dues for the current year and benefit by the discounted fees for attendance at the current year convention.

2 – We should all be pleased to find that the EPIA has become more and more recognized as a standard of quality in the packaged ice industry in Europe. As such, we are finding some instances of non-EPIA members purporting to be associated with the EPIA.This has the effect of diluting the significance of our “brand.” Your BoD has encountered this situation several times over the past few years and have been able to stop the infractions. In order to better curtail the misuse of the EPIA proprietary registered name, logo, and tagline (Ice You Can Trust), there will be a “bounty” offered for reporting and helping to curtail the illegitimate use of the EPIA proprietary property under the

The “bounty” is determined to be equal to the cost of the convention registration for the first convention attendee and awarded at the time of convention registration by the attendee being registered without fee for the first attendee at the next annual convention.
If the member submitting the infraction does not attend the convention that year, the “bounty” will become null and void.

Update HACCP certificates:

We remind all our producer’s members to send your up dated HACCP certificates to Maryse as soon as possible.

Convention 2019

Next place to meet again in 2019 will be in Bilbao, North West Spain from 14 to 17^th October organised by Francisco Wend and his dynamic team: Hielos de Vitoria!