At SIAL Paris 2026, a frying machine won the top prize
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SIAL Innovation received more than 2,750 products this year and kept 775 for its selection, a record after several slower editions according to the organizer’s opening-day press briefing. The Grand Prix Or went to a machine. ZEEN Tech, a Swiss startup founded in 2025, replaces oil with water to fry, dry, roast and sterilize food, and it’s the first winner from the Equipment and technologies category in the competition’s 30 years.
I spent October 18 and 19 on the floor of SIAL Paris at Paris Nord Villepinte and recorded three founders on camera. Below are the winners, the two trends that filled the aisles, the policy talk on the main stage, and what those founders told me.
Two Swiss companies took the oil out of crisps
ZEEN Tech’s patented process makes crisps, popcorn, dried fruit, dried vegetables and herbs without added fat, according to the SIAL Innovation announcement. The machine is designed and built in Switzerland, and it’s aimed at food manufacturers and restaurants.
The rest of the podium went to finished products. Patislove (Turkey) took silver with Three-Biotic Yogurt Bites, fruit coated in yogurt that combines prebiotics, probiotics and postbiotics. Green Matcha (France) took bronze with a Nespresso-compatible capsule of matcha and powdered coconut milk.
A second Swiss company won with the same idea. NÜKT took the Deli and snacking category with crisps cooked in water, without oil or air, in potato, beetroot, apple and sweet potato. Xavier Terlet (ProtéinesXTC), whose firm runs the competition with SIAL, put the case for entering bluntly on opening day: “A company that doesn’t innovate is a company that dies.”
The startup village did well on the night. Two of the three podium winners, ZEEN Tech and Green Matcha, exhibited there, and so did NÜKT, Labo Dumoulin and Edonia, whose Cocoriton finger won its category. That’s 5 of the 23 winning products from a village of about 150 startups, at a show of about 8,000 exhibitors.
5 of the 23 winners came from the startup village
From products entered to award winners.
Functional food reached the everyday aisle
The press office counted more than 130 innovations close to dietary supplements at this edition, against about ten at a usual one. Collagen came in chocolate bites from Essence Expert (Poland) and in no-added-sugar fruit spreads from Tru Balance (Bulgaria), with 22 g of protein per jar.
Gut health had its own corner. Labo Dumoulin (France), winner of the Startup category, brought back tepache, a Mexican fermented pineapple drink, in a live, lightly sparkling version with no added sugar. Pop’s, the iced-tea brand launched by Charles Gilles-Compagnon of FastGoodCuisine, adds fiber to fruit-flavored teas. Pulse Protein (Belgium) puts 10 g of plant protein in a 330 ml can of sparkling water.
The demand data backs the shelf. In Kantar’s Food 360 study for SIAL Insights 2026, 6 in 10 people worldwide and 5 in 10 in France put digestive health, energy, immunity or vitality first when buying functional products. ProtéinesXTC counted an 86 percent rise in new French products claiming high protein between 2021 and 2025. On GLP-1 weight-loss treatments, Emily Mayer (Circana) told the trend book that value is moving “from volume to benefit”.
Snacking got a hall of its own
SIAL gave deli and snacking products a full hall this year, Hall 4A. Circana data published in July 2026 puts snack sales across six European markets at €186 billion, up 5.5 percent in value.
The products followed the health line. Re.Snack’s Pop Comedy popcorn has no sugar or salt and a Nutri-Score A. Artisan Daqi (France) makes organic chickpea fries. Cocoriton (France) won the Cereals, pulses, fruit and vegetables category with a wheat, spinach and spirulina finger. BeJerky (Italy) turns salami and speck into oven-baked chips, and Brets turned the Breton crêpe into sweet chips.
France is the exception in the data. Kantar found 4 percent of French consumers increasingly replace meals with snacks, against 10 percent worldwide. Karin Perrot (Kantar) called the fragmentation of meals “partial” and the demand for convenience “already widely established”.
Drinks took over the startup village
The startup village held about 150 companies in both 2024 and 2026. The mix changed. Walking the village I saw a lot of drinks and no alcohol at all, and SIAL’s published startup lists, which give one product category per company, show the same shift.
Drinks grew and alcohol all but vanished
Share of startups by product category, 2024 (first bar) and 2026 (second bar). The eight categories that moved most.
Non-alcoholic drinks went from 23 percent of the listed startups to 31 percent, and grocery from 15 to 24 percent. Nutrition and dietetic products, a category with no startup in 2024, reached 8 percent. Equipment, technology and services went from 23 to 11 percent, and alcoholic drinks from 9 percent to a single company. Several companies came back from 2024, among them Labo Dumoulin, Mojo Maté, Yumgo and Active Label, which won the Equipment and technologies award in 2024.
Three founders on the floor
I asked three founders to explain their product in under a minute. Each one sits inside a trend from the sections above.
Florian Baud, co-founder of Re.Snack. The company, based near Dijon, makes the Nuage and Pop Comedy snack brands. “We distribute in 6,000 supermarkets in France,” he told me.
Sheryline Thavisouk, co-founder of Le Papondu. Her company makes “a plant-based egg that can replace the whole egg,” from faba beans. SIAL Insights 2026 found plant-based launches moving past meat substitutes: substitute launches fell 30 percent worldwide between 2021 and 2025 (ProtéinesXTC) while European volumes grew 16 percent (Circana).
David Damman, co-founder of Mojo Maté. The Dutch brand makes “refreshing, sparkling yerba mate drinks, organic and fair,” in his words, which puts it in the same functional-drinks aisle as JANE and Pop’s.
Sovereignty and sustainability set the tone on stage
The opening speeches were about trade. Jean-François Loiseau (ANIA), chair of SIAL Paris’s board, told French companies that “to succeed internationally, you have to hunt as a pack and carry one flag.” Rodolphe Lameyse (Comexposium) told visitors that their “next market is probably in the next aisle.” India, this year’s partner country, sent Jawed Ashraf (India Trade Promotion Organisation), who described India as “a sixth of humanity” and now self-sufficient in food. G7 agriculture ministers met at the show on October 19.
The SIAL For Change awards, run with The Foodies and backed by the European Commission, went to companies with measured results. LSDH, a French group with about 2,500 employees, took the large-company Grand Prix for long-term farming contracts and recycled plastic in packaging. Origine took the SME Grand Prix for moving more than 8,000 Indonesian spice-farming families to regenerative agriculture and agroforestry. Among the themed prizes, INTACT (France, founded 2022) makes plant proteins from pulses with up to 90 percent less carbon, and Kignon turns about 30 tonnes of unsold bread a year into biscuits, employing people with disabilities.
If you’re exhibiting at the 2028 edition
Enter SIAL Innovation: 775 of the 2,750 products entered made the 2026 selection, and there’s a Startup category. Ask the press office for the startup village tour, which 14 Septembre ran for journalists on October 19 and 20. And bring something people can taste, because SIAL Taste served more than 100 of the selected innovations in 15-minute sessions.
If you’re weighing whether SIAL Paris or another food show fits your international plans, get in touch with us at Sesamers. We’ve worked with food exhibitions since 2020, including Tuttofood, SnackShow and Vitafoods.
Disclosure: SIAL Paris is a Sesamers client, the figures in this piece come from its press briefings and the SIAL Insights 2026 trend book.
