SIAL BAKERY GIVES A PRACTICAL STAGE TO THE ART OF BAKING
Bakeries have always been more than places to buy bread. From the neighbourhood boulangerie in France to Germany’s dense network of bakery counters, the British high street bakery chain, the Korean café-bakery or the Mexican panadería, they are small theatres of everyday food culture, where craft, convenience, indulgence and social life meet across the counter.
Their scale remains striking. France counts around 33,000 artisan bakery-pastry businesses, while Germany still has more than 9,200 bakery businesses and over 40,000 sales outlets, despite years of consolidation. In the UK, bakery is increasingly shaped by branded food-to-go operators, with Greggs targeting more than 3,000 shops over the long term and Gail’s continuing its rapid expansion. Behind these different models sits a vast global category: In 2025, Grupo Bimbo, one of the world’s largest baked goods suppliers, estimated the global baked goods industry at around $641 billion.
In this context, it feels fitting that SIAL Paris should give the bakery a more visible, practical stage in 2026. France is known around the world for its bread, viennoiserie and pâtisserie; the show is known for bringing together global food business. SIAL Bakery sits exactly at that intersection.
A working bakery in Hall 5B
SIAL Bakery will be positioned in Hall 5B as an 85 sq m realistic and functional replica of a bakery workshop. The space has been designed to include the professional equipment needed to prepare sweet bakery products and snacking formats, rather than presenting the bakery as a static display. It will function as a live production environment, open to visitors throughout the day.
The ambition is deliberately experiential. The design draws on the codes of a Parisian boutique while keeping the technical side visible. Equipment, movements and techniques are intended to be accessible to visitors, allowing them to watch the process as much as taste the result. Two bakers will animate the space, preparing a changing selection of French bakery specialities across the day, with tastings offered to visitors in a setting designed to encourage them to pause rather than simply pass through.
The programme follows the rhythm of a bakery day. Mornings will be dedicated to viennoiseries. Lunchtime will shift towards sandwiches and croque-monsieurs, including vegetarian and pork-free options. Afternoons will move into sweet products. It is a simple structure, but a clever one. It connects bakery to breakfast, lunch, snacking and indulgence, reflecting the way the category now stretches across multiple consumption occasions.
Where bakery craft meets business needs
The value of SIAL Bakery is not only in the smell of warm bread or the sight of viennoiseries coming out of the oven. It is also in the industrial conversation behind those moments. Bakery products sit between tradition and acceleration. Consumers want authenticity, better ingredients and visible craft, while operators need precision, consistency, energy efficiency and formats adapted to foodservice, retail and on-the-go consumption.
The space will therefore showcase professional equipment supplied by confirmed partners. The line-up includes ovens, mixers, kneading equipment, dough sheeters, controlled fermentation cabinets, dividers, slicers, moulders and other tools supporting the full bakery process.
The SIAL Bakery partners reflect different links in that chain and together, they place the bakery not as nostalgia, but as a technical ecosystem. JAC, founded in 1946, specialises in bakery solutions from sourdough fermentation to dough mechanisation and bread slicing, with a presence in more than 100 countries. MAP Fours de Boulangerie brings French-made professional ovens, with an emphasis on compact design, performance and energy optimisation.
PANEM INTERNATIONAL, active since 1969, is strongly associated with controlled fermentation and cold technology for bakery, pastry and related sectors. RONDO, the Swiss specialist in dough sheeting and shaping, brings its long-standing focus on dough processing. Meanwhile, VMI contributes more than 70 years of French-designed mixing and kneading expertise for bakery, pastry and snacking.
Bakery as a business signal
For the wider food sector, the arrival of SIAL Bakery also points to broader market dynamics. Bakery products are adapting to new consumer expectations around convenience, indulgence, health, provenance and hybrid meals. The same croissant may belong to breakfast, coffee shop culture, frozen bakery logistics or premium hotel service. The same bread may serve artisan retail, sandwich assembly, plant-based foodservice, supermarket bakery or export positioning.
This is where SIAL Bakery becomes more than a pleasant corner of the show. It creates a point of contact between producers, equipment manufacturers, retailers, distributors, chefs and foodservice buyers. It also supports the show’s wider objective of highlighting bakery and snacking as active spaces for innovation, product creation and tasting. The aim is to make the bakery area a place of encounter, novelty and excitement in Hall 5B, while showcasing international know-how and innovation present at the event.
The format matches the scale around it. SIAL Paris 2026 is expected to welcome around 295,000 professionals, with nearly 8,000 exhibitors across 280,000 sq m of exhibition space and 10 key agri-food sectors.
Within such a large food industry show, smaller experiential spaces matter. They help visitors read the market through use, taste and demonstration, not only through packaging and product listings.
A bakery that speaks the language of SIAL Paris
SIAL Bakery brings together several ideas that already define SIAL Paris: inspiration, business, international exchange and product discovery. It also gives one of France’s most recognisable food cultures a forward-looking setting. The bakery is familiar, but the questions around it are contemporary. How can tradition be scaled without being flattened? How can equipment support better productivity without hiding the human touch? How can bakeries answer demand for snacking, premiumisation, dietary diversity and experience-led food?
In a country where bread still carries a cultural charge far beyond its ingredients, SIAL Bakery feels both natural and timely. It is a tribute to French bakery culture, but also a reminder that the future of bakeries will be shaped by innovation, equipment, international know-how and the changing rhythms of consumption. At SIAL Paris, the oven door opens onto the wider future of food.
Image credits
Raphael Nogueira - Unsplash