Bridge2Food North America 2026

Consumers want more fiber without giving up clean label, low cost, or the taste and texture they already expect. That's the reformulation challenge behind every fiber project. Drawing on a decade of reformulations across many applications and brands, this session shares what separates clean-label fiber wins from the ones that stalled, and a framework for turning demand into products that sell.

Dairy alternatives are evolving beyond early generation products. This panel explores advances in fermentation, protein systems, and processing that aim to improve creaminess, stretch, and overall performance. Speakers will discuss consumer expectations, formulation breakthroughs, and category specific challenges. The conversation will focus on where dairy alternatives can win and where realism is required.

Protein demand is surging, but consumers are stuck in a "protein predicament": they know they want more, yet remain confused about how much they need and what "complete," "high quality," or "healthy" really mean.

Mattson dug into this gap through a mix of nutrition science, consumer research, market analysis, and AI-enabled tools, focusing on high-need groups like GLP-1 users, peri/post-menopausal women, healthspan-focused older adults, and performance-driven consumers. Across all of them, protein reads as essential, supporting satiety, strength, and energy, but confusion persists around ultra-processing, isolates, plant vs. animal sources, and how to trust protein claims.

This session translates those findings into practical takeaways: where protein innovation is over-serving consumers, where it's falling short, and where the real white space is for products that are nutritionally relevant, consumer-resonant, and commercially viable.

Green Rebel Foods is reimagining Indonesia's culinary heritage for a new generation of consumers, transforming beloved traditional dishes into accessible, plant-based staples. In this session, co-founder and CEO Helga Angelina shares how the company has grown from a single market to serving over 2,000 foodservice outlets and 300 retailers across Indonesia, Singapore, the Philippines, and Malaysia. She'll explore Green Rebel's hybrid protein approach, blending mushroom and soy-based ingredients to balance nutrition, taste, and cost, and discuss how affordability and cultural relevance, not novelty alone, have been the true drivers of adoption across Southeast Asia's diverse food markets.

This presentation will introduce LDC to the audience, then highlight the need for meeting consumer demand for higher quality plant proteins with some published data. Presentation will address LDC’s approach to developing excellent quality plant proteins via sustainable development to food and beverage industry to provide for daily protein requirement for current global human population and 10 billion by 2050. This presentation will further follow-up on LDC’s strategic growth intent and mission to develop best in class plant proteins and its success to bringing excellent quality new LDC plant proteins to the market by process innovations, scaling-up, and by building its plant proteins manufacturing plant to deliver the same to its customers and consumers.

Recent advances in producing various fibers utilizing validation platforms can be leveraged to produce value-added and sustainable dietary fibers across the plant based industry. This session will explore the research that led to the development of a highly soluble, short-chain oat fiber that disappears into food and drink with no taste or texture penalty, backed by clinical data showing improved glucose metabolism and gut health. It will then provide an overview of the largest fiber structure-function database, mapping how each fiber's structure modulates health through the microbiome.

Once a niche sustainability concept, upcycled foods are rapidly entering the mainstream as consumers seek products that align with environmental values without compromising taste or quality. Rising demand, retail expansion, and broader category adoption from snacks and beverages to pet food and indulgent products are being fueled by stronger storytelling, certification, and transparency. This session will explore how consumer perception is evolving, what truly drives purchase beyond sustainability claims, and how brands can effectively communicate value. The discussion will also examine how upcycling is transitioning from a waste-reduction narrative to a scalable, consumer-led growth opportunity.

 As fermentation titers climb and engineered strains mature into high-yield cellular factories, the real bottleneck to commercialization has shifted downstream. Drawing on stories and data from GEA's global Test Center Network — where our experts work daily on these and parallel industry challenges — this session unpacks how separation, concentration, purification, and drying decisions determine cost, scalability, and time-to-market. Combining these real-world stories illustrates how an integrated, end-to-end process view — not just a bigger fermenter — is what actually de-risks scale-up.

The biggest story of the past few years -  GLP-1 drugs - has food and drink brands scrambling to adapt. And while brands must consider reactive strategies, for many, dramatic shifts may not be required. GLP-1 user behaviors don't look terribly different from the general nutrition and consumption trends that were already unfolding. If anything, GLP-1's could be the accelerant, or the catalyst, to trial and loyalty with the right messaging.

What happens when plant-based becomes the default and meat becomes the opt-in? Across hospitals, stadiums, schools, and corporate dining, choice architecture is quietly reshaping how millions of Americans eat - without restricting freedom of choice. This session explores how institutional foodservice operators can use plant-based defaults, balanced protein options, and plant-forward menu design to meet carbon goals, lower food costs, and improve inclusivity. Drawing on real-world results from healthcare systems, universities, and corporate cafeterias, the conversation examines what works, what scales, and where the next frontier of demand-side transformation is heading. Particular emphasis will be given to the implementation of such strategies and a tool kit for CPGs and food service operators will be shared.

The food and beverage industry faces mounting pressure to innovate faster, but most organizations are trying to do it with fragmented workflows. R&D works in spreadsheets, PLM data lives in disconnected systems, and quality teams manually reconcile specifications at the end of the line. The result is duplicated effort, avoidable reformulation cycles, and delayed launches.

In this session, Uncountable examines what product development looks like when R&D, PLM, and Quality operate on shared data infrastructure, and how centralizing formulation, lifecycle, and quality data eliminates the handoff failures that slow teams down. Attendees will leave with a practical framework to diagnose fragmentation and evaluate an end-to-end informatics platform.

The food industry faces a widening squeeze: feeding a growing population while cutting emissions, deforestation, and pressure on land and water. Microalgae are one of nature's most efficient sources of protein and nutrition, yet for decades their promise has been held back by contamination risk, off-taste, and the significant CAPEX linked to conventional closed systems.

Arborea changes this. Our groundbreaking, patented BioSolar™ Leaf technology converts waste CO₂ from any industry and sunlight into microalgae biomass on non-fertile land, with no deforestation and no loss of biodiversity. Fully contained and highly controlled, it scales without expensive fermentation tanks, raceway ponds, or pressurised gases, and with no contamination risk, producing net-zero food and feed ingredients.

The result is a portfolio built for the mass market. NOvo Protein™ is a neutral-tasting, neutral-colour, water-soluble protein with a complete amino acid profile and emulsifying and gelling functionality. BioSolar™ Spirulina is a premium whole-biomass superfood of unmatched purity, consistency, and clean taste.

Both ingredients are ready to formulate today, and we are already proving it across a range of food and beverage concepts developed in our food lab and available at our booth. Join us to see what microalgae can finally deliver.

While first-generation precision nutrition platforms successfully leverage artificial intelligence to analyze individual consumer biometric data, a critical operational execution gap remains within the broader agribusiness value chain. Traditional agricultural processing and Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) marketing models remain optimized for economies of scale and broad, standardized distribution. Consequently, they fail to capture the high-margin premiums offered by two critical consumer extremes demanding real-time, personalized nutrient profiles: data-literate Gen Z/Alpha demographics optimizing physical performance, and an expanding aging population managing age-related muscle decline (sarcopenia) alongside complex, pre-existing health conditions.

Building upon the functional marketing and benchmarking methodologies utilized by traditional high-touch protein firms, this presentation establishes an agribusiness framework for executing advanced consumer micro-segmentation. We analyze the consumer economics, operational feasibility, and institutional standardization of interfacing AI-driven personal nutrition targets (ingested via fitness wearables or healthcare monitoring systems) directly with modular, short-run agricultural processing and automated packaging lines. By shifting from broad-spectrum distribution to hyper-individualized, micro-batch fulfillment, agribusiness firms can eliminate consumer meal-preparation friction, ensure strict nutritional standardization for medical and senior-living environments, and capture unprecedented value-added premiums at the retail and institutional interface.

Sustainable protein development can be viewed as an optimization problem over formulations or bioprocess conditions, incorporating diverse considerations such as taste, affordability, nutrition, and climate impact. We present a framework called expert-guided Bayesian optimization (EGBO) for solving the optimization problems that arise in the sustainable protein domain. I will discuss our initial results applying EGBO to plant-based dairy optimization. I will also briefly discuss our work on predicting sensory properties of sustainable proteins.

Despite growing awareness of gut health and metabolic wellness, most consumers still fall significantly short of recommended fiber intake. At the same time, fiber’s expanding role is now beyond digestion, including satiety, vitality, signaling, blood sugar management, and long-term health outcomes. This session will explore how brands are translating this clear nutritional gap into compelling consumer propositions. Industry leaders will discuss what is driving renewed interest in fiber, which product formats and claims resonate most, and how to balance functionality with taste and accessibility. The discussion will highlight how fiber is evolving from a niche health message into a mainstream driver of product innovation and demand.

The debate around ultra-processed foods (UPFs) is reshaping consumer perception and policy discussions in the US and around the world. This session explores how clean label claims intersect with processing realities, nutrition science, and consumer understanding. Speakers will unpack where science aligns or conflicts with perception and how brands can communicate responsibly. The discussion will address regulatory scrutiny, agreed-upon definitions of UPFs, and the risk of oversimplified narratives.

The honest truth is that taste and texture remain the number one reason consumers don't come back - and this session is designed to have that conversation head-on. We're bringing together R&D leaders to dig into what's still hard: replicating the bite, juiciness, and mouthfeel of animal proteins; managing texture degradation over shelf life; and closing the sensory gap between what performs in the lab and what lands with consumers at home. Rather than showcasing wins, we want a candid, technically rich conversation about where the real challenges still sit and how the industry's best are tackling them.