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FoodBev spoke with Jean-Gabriel Mollard, event director of SIAL Paris to find out what’s in store for the 2026 event, taking place from 17-21 October.

First held in 1964, the biennial event is one of the world’s largest trade shows for the food and beverage industry. Read on to find out more.

What can visitors can expect from this year’s show?

SIAL Paris 2026 will be an incredible edition because we will have over 8,000 exhibitors, and we are expecting around 300,000 professionals on site during the five days of the show. What’s amazing is that we have 130 countries exhibiting, which makes it incredibly diverse, with over 400,000 products.

It’s a generalist show for food and beverage, so it means that we have every kind of product. That’s really amazing because it allows us to gain a very interesting understanding of what’s trending, why, and the cultural side of things as well.

We are monitoring innovation because it’s in the DNA of the show. We exist to point out what’s new in the industry because it’s a place where professionals gather – exhibitors, visitors, distributors, importers, wholesalers and foodservice operators.

They are all coming to do business, find new suppliers and discover new products. But they are also coming to network and learn about what’s happening in the industry and what’s likely to happen in the coming years.

What are some of the key trends you have observed across the food and beverage industry this year that you expect to see addressed in the innovations showcased at SIAL Paris 2026?

Usually we have three mega trends a year. We couldn't do that [this year] because it was very diverse. What I can point out is that there is a very big push around personal individualisation. Consumers want the way they eat to be easily adaptable to their lifestyles. So it means that rituals are evolving and everyone is expecting the food business to follow. They should find whatever they need, wherever they are. So that's something that is building up and gaining traction. We felt this for a few years already and it can be stronger in certain markets than others, but globally it's gaining a lot of traction.

Plant-based food is moving beyond meat alternatives or cheese alternatives. It's more diverse. It's turning to hybridisation and snacking. If there is more and more people that wants to have plant-based meals, they as well want to have plant-based snacks. So it's interesting because we used to have very strong opposition between the plant-based and animal protein. There's still that kind of friction, but there's a maturation in the plant-based market.

Consumers like to eat local. Why? Because local is reassuring. So this is not something new, but what's very interesting is that it’s mixing, because there is attraction for finding local food from somewhere else in the world.

For example, you are in the UK and you want to eat Italian food. You don’t just want to eat Italian food, you want to eat this particular cheese from Puglia because it comes from a particular village, it’s a goat’s cheese, and those goats eat a certain kind of leaves.

Storytelling is becoming more and more important. Having all of those details and the story behing a product is considered by consumers to be a sign of quality. It can be fake, but most of the time, it’s quite accurate.

What's interesting there is that consumers are focusing on wellbeing, more than just general health. Consumers are looking for personalisation. They’re not just looking for food that is good for their body or good for their health. They want that, but they want it for a specific purpose. They want to eat food because it’s good for sleep or it’s good for sports performance. So we’re seeing the offer expanding around more specific health benefits.

Snacking and street food are really interesting because it doesn't mean that the dining or fixed meal is dying, it's evolving. Consumers have a lot of choice in everything, but they also have a lot of constraints.

There are constraints around money, the cost of living and the cost of food. So we see a lot of products that are either trying to be better products, but less expensive. This is a trend that is expanding as well.

And they find ways of doing that, maybe by simplifying the ingredient list or changing ingredients to use cheaper ones that are still good for health. Finding alternatives that are better for the planet because they’re not coming from the other side of the world, but also because they are less expensive.

That can be the case for chocolate or coffee. You can say everything you want about preserving the planet, but most of the time, it comes back to price. We see a lot of alternatives to coffee that are proposing less expensive solutions. And that’s quite interesting when the price of coffee is fluctuating a lot, for example.

Back to snacking and street food, it’s exploding because it's in the 'codes', it's in the 'codes' of the way of living, but also in the 'codes' with our digital lives. Social media is always changing the way the market is behaving and the way we are informing ourselves. So, this is making street food more and more desirable.

Are there any specific areas of technological innovation that you’re expecting to make a big impact at the show?

There's a lot of technological innovation at the show. SIAL Paris has a lot of exhibitors that are proposing new solutions or products that are made possible by technology.

So we see a lot of AI and data becoming increasingly important across the whole food value chain, from research and development to product formulation and consumer understanding. Which is very interesting because it means that technology is not only used to develop products, but it’s also useful, obviously, in marketing.

Consumers are increasingly interested in performance. They want to monitor everything, and we see a lot of collaboration between food producers and technology providers

What’s new at this year’s event?

We are launching a new feature, StrEat Lab, [where you can] experience a street of Paris but within the show. You’ll find places where you can buy food, featuring street food concepts from different countries. That will be a very interesting new area of the show.

We also have SIAL Bakery, which is a new feature, obviously around bakery because there is lots of thing going on in the bakery field, both in terms of products and the way of consumers are going to bakery shops and consuming those products.

Our AI matchmaking tool has a dedicated team. It's a gigantic show, right? So when you're a visitor, it's sometimes a bit difficult to decide which exhibitor you should go and see. Once you register as a visitor or as an exhibitor, you just enter in your profile and what you're interested in and why. The matchmaking tool will make a proposition about who you should meet and why. And you can even plan meetings for the five days of the show.

SIAL Analytics is a digital platform, where you can find everything about food intelligence and business intelligence related to food. It's for companies working in the food sector: producers, wholesalers, distributors, consultants. Who are the hottest new players in the industry? Which big group are investing in which trend? Which trends are emerging or consolidating?, etc.

SIAL for Change is again, a new feature we launched in 2024. It was a competition amongst our exhibitors around CSR and sustainability.

We wanted to put forward the exhibitors that have interesting and important initiatives around sustainability and CSR in general. So this year, in 2026, we expanded that.

You can go and visit this area, where there's a stage, and during those five days of the show, there will be speakers, keynotes, roundtables around CSR. It's important that the companies understand that there are not only constraints, but also ways they can integrate [sustainability] into their businesses and how that will help them to differentiate from their competitors.

What opportunities can attending SIAL Paris bring for professionals across the global food ecosystem?

The opportunities are clearly to discover new companies, new products, new initiatives, new technologies and new markets.

It’s a place to discover innovations, not only products, but global innovations. It’s a huge place to network, and there are plenty of opportunities there.

We are here to turn that into actionable intelligence and really concrete business opportunities.

What I really want to push forward is that everything, in the end, relates to business. Whether you come here for knowledge, you come here for networking or you come here to sign deals.