Key Business Outlooks For 2026: Simon Bird, Vice President of Food & Beverage Biosciences, IFF
Over the next five years, the bakery industry will be shaped by stricter regulations, economic volatility, and increasing variability in wheat quality driven by climate change. Together with rising expectations for transparency, sustainability, and efficiency, these pressures will accelerate the shift toward cleaner labels, smarter processing, and more resilient supply chains.
We asked the most important players in the European and American baking industry about their expectations for the year ahead. They talked about opportunities, changing consumer expectations, what type of support the industry needs, but also about the drawbacks of an unstable political climate and the challenges that come with labour shortage and energy prices increasing.
Simon Bird, Vice President of Food & Beverage Biosciences, IFF
How would you assess your company’s performance over the past year?
Over the past year, IFF and our Food Biosciences business, specifically, delivered resilient performance
despite a challenging operating environment. Our focus was to maintain solid customer engagement
with a disciplined focus on operational excellence, while strengthening our innovation and commercial capabilities.
What are your expectations for 2026, taking into account the evolving market dynamics?
The bakery industry never stands still. Once seen as a traditional comfort category, it now gives space to innovation. Consumers now expect label-friendly*, ethically sourced, and minimally processed products that support both physical and emotional well‐being. At the same time, value is being redefined through a balance of affordability and accessibility, while playful formats and indulgence features continue to drive excitement. As technology and artificial intelligence accelerate product development and personalization, consumers still desire authenticity and human stories that ground innovation in meaning
How do you foresee the global and regional bakery markets evolving, and what are your company’s top priorities for 2026?
We expect the global bakery market to continue navigating a mix of economic pressure, regulatory change, and shifting consumer expectations. Around the world, consumers are more value driven and selective, which is pushing manufacturers to balance affordability with quality and consistency. At the same time, rising ingredient volatility, stricter sustainability expectations, and ongoing supply chain challenges are accelerating interest in technologies that deliver efficiency, waste reduction, and reliable performance.
Within this landscape, our priorities for 2026 are centered around supporting bakery manufacturers
with solutions that deliver tangible, application-level value.
What have been your primary growth drivers over the past year, and what is the most significant
lesson you’ve learned in managing your operations?
Our momentum this past year has largely been driven by the industry’s demand for performance-led, value-generating enzyme solutions. Fresh‐keeping technologies have played a major role. Customers continue to seek ways to keep products softer for longer, especially in regions where packaged bakery and extended distribution chains dominate, like the innovation behind POWERFRESH® ACE in the U.S. Meanwhile, dough‐strengthening solutions like ENOVERATM remain essential as manufacturers push for greater line efficiency, improved dough tolerance, and more uniform product quality across different – sometimes challenging – flour types and processing variations. Both areas benefit from broader market drivers such as rising ingredient costs, heightened affordability pressures, and the accelerated need to optimize every step of production.
The most significant lesson this year has been the importance of agility and cross functional alignment. With the market changing quickly, whether due to regulatory developments, cost fluctuations, or shifting consumer preferences, collaboration between technical teams, commercial teams, and operations has been essential. This integrated approach ensures we can rapidly tailor solutions to customer needs, support them through reformulation challenges, and maintain reliability even amid fluctuating global conditions. Ultimately, the past year underscored that in today’s baking landscape, speed, clarity, and adaptability are just as critical as technical performance.
As competition in the baking industry intensifies, what strategies are you employing to
strengthen your market position? How do you balance operational investments with innovation
and R&D?
Competition is intensifying across the bakery sector as regulations tighten, ingredient costs fluctuate, and customer expectations continue to rise. To stay ahead, we focus on solutions that address long term, universal needs and strengthen our ability to support bakeries through market volatility. Our approach balances disciplined, value driven research and development with practical, customer first execution – prioritizing innovations that enable label-friendly*, cost-efficient production, and consistent performance. By staying responsive to global challenges and remaining grounded in impactful innovation, we strengthen our position while helping customers remain competitive in an increasingly complex landscape.
What are the most significant forces driving change in your business for 2026, and how is your
company preparing to address them?
In 2026, the bakery sector is being reshaped by tighter regulations, economic volatility, and shifting consumer expectations around transparency, value, and sustainability. These pressures, combined with geopolitical uncertainty and evolving demographic trends, are accelerating the need for greater efficiency, resilience, and cleaner, more compliant, formulations across the industry.
At the same time, our own business landscape is evolving. With the strategic review of IFF’s Food Ingredients business underway, we are sharpening our strategic focus to innovation in the areas that remain core to IFF – including our food enzymes portfolio as part of the health and biosciences industry – which continue to be essential to performance, shelf life, and label-friendly* innovation for bakery manufacturers worldwide.
We’re preparing for this next chapter by staying ahead of regulatory developments, strengthening both our technical and market readiness, and concentrating our innovation efforts where we can create the most differentiated value. This includes solutions that help customers navigate cost pressure, supply variability, and rising compliance standards – while also leveraging the unique capabilities of our enzyme technologies. This ensures we remain agile, customer-centric, and well-positioned for a rapidly changing global bakery landscape.
From your perspective, what policy, regulatory, or market shifts would most benefit the baking
sector in 2026, enabling businesses like yours to thrive?
Consumers around the world are placing greater emphasis on understanding where ingredients come from, how they’re processed, and the impact they have on the planet. The clean label movement, with its focus on shorter, more familiar ingredient lists and the removal of artificial additives like emulsifiers, has shifted from preference to expectation.
At IFF, we’re well-positioned to support this demand with an extensive portfolio of label-friendly* bakery enzymes. As bakeries look to reduce or replace emulsifiers, enzymes offer a highly effective, naturally inspired alternative that maintains product quality without compromising transparency. While “clean label” can vary by category, we define label friendly in line with the common expectation of reducing or eliminating E-numbers and chemical additives like emulsifiers.
Looking ahead to the next five years, what is your vision for the industry, and how is your
company positioning itself to shape and contribute to its future growth?
Over the next five years, the bakery industry will be shaped by stricter regulations, economic volatility, and increasing variability in wheat quality driven by climate change. Together with rising expectations for transparency, sustainability, and efficiency, these pressures will accelerate the shift toward cleaner labels, smarter processing, and more resilient supply chains.
We aim to contribute to this growth by focusing on solutions that help bakeries adapt quickly — supporting compliance, enabling cost‐effective production, and providing technologies that meet evolving consumer and regulatory expectations. This positions us to stay agile while helping the industry move toward a more sustainable, competitive, and innovative future.
*Label-friendly may have different meanings, in bakery it is mostly common associated to the
elimination and reduction of E-numbers and chemicals additives