Ethiopia's Bakers Get a New Stage: Arada Park to Host the Addis Cake & Bake Expo

Addis Ababa — For three days this August, the plazas of Arada Park will smell like butter and sugar instead of fresh concrete. The Addis Cake & Bake Expo 2026 moves into the park on Piassa's edge from August 21 to 23, pulling bakers, ingredient suppliers, equipment makers, packaging firms, cafés, hotels and pastry brands into one venue to trade ideas, deals and, inevitably, samples. It is a homecoming of sorts: a park built to give Piassa's traders a new stage is now hosting one of the city's newest industries putting itself on display.

The premise is simple. Whether someone bakes, supplies ingredients, builds ovens and equipment, prints packaging, runs a café or hotel kitchen, or is trying to grow a pastry brand from a home kitchen into a shopfront, the expo is a chance to put that work in front of the people who make, sell, serve and shape the industry's next chapter in Ethiopia.

The venue has its own recent history. Arada Park sits on what was, until this year, a 40-hectare stretch of hazardous, deteriorating housing that Addis Ababa's city administration reimagined as a multi-purpose urban destination, renovating more than 700 existing homes and buildings in the process. Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed inaugurated the park in early May, with Mayor Adanech Abiebie calling it a nexus of history, beauty and modernity built on the site of old Piassa.

The numbers behind the park explain why it can absorb an expo of this size. Fifteen of its 40 hectares are given over to greenery, threaded by 5 kilometers of asphalt road, a 6-kilometer pedestrian walkway and 5-kilometer tracks each for cycling and running. On the commercial side, 131 retail units, seven cafés and restaurants, a supermarket and a bank branch give the park a built-in customer base, with priority given to traders displaced from the old Piazza market. A sports arena with a gym and seven halls, eight plazas and amphitheaters, and a Miniature City for children round out a site designed to host exactly the mix of commerce and public life an industry expo needs.

Arada Park did not appear in isolation. It is one node in the city's wider riverside and corridor push, which Mayor Adanech Abiebie described in February as eight riverside development projects covering 48 kilometers of the city and spanning roughly 3,000 hectares of land, stretching from the Entoto-Peacock-Karamara corridor to the Kebena riverfront. Prime Minister Abiy has pointed to the same corridor as a magnet for capital, telling the Finance Forward Ethiopia conference in January that the initiative had drawn around 1.3 trillion birr in private investment into malls, restaurants and other businesses lining the riverbanks. Set against that scale, a three-day bake expo is a small event. But it is exactly the kind of foot traffic and small-business activity the riverside project was built to generate: a park that once displaced traders now gives a young industry room to grow.

Organizers describe the event as Ethiopia's first large-scale platform built entirely around cakes, pastries and the baking trade, mixing business-to-business networking with tastings, demonstrations and competitions for the public. Exhibitors can register through the expo's official site ahead of the three-day run at Arada Park, Piassa, Addis Ababa, from August 21 to 23, 2026.