IFE London is smaller than you'd expect, at least if you're coming in with a reference point. My colleague Barbara Sexton, who is a long-time visitor of SIAL in Paris, puts it at about a tenth of the scale. While IFE might be smaller than many other food trade shows, it is part of the larger Food Drink & Hospitality Week that even includes manufacturing and technology. If you plan to attend next year, plan 1-2 days depending on how in-depth you want to go.

When I asked Barbara whether the ongoing conflict in the Middle East had affected attendance, her first impression on the opening morning was of a floor that hadn’t quite arrived yet. A reasonable number of booths were empty or half-dressed, with materials stuck in transit and products that hadn’t made it in time. It filled out over the course of the day, and by the time she left on day three the show had found its feet. But that first morning stuck with her and is a bit indicative of what the UK market is like: getting into the market is harder than it looks, and the obstacles have a way of showing up before you've even started.

A lot of the exhibitors on the floor weren't British brands consolidating their home market. Instead they were foreign companies trying to get into the UK, drawn by the perception that it’s the most accessible entry point into Europe: English-speaking and familiar in business culture. What many of them hadn’t fully reckoned with, Barbara says, is what the shelf actually looks like once you get there.

Own-brand products are increasingly dominating the UK retail landscape in a way that surprises even seasoned food industry professionals. In some categories, Barbara observed, well over half of what you saw on shelf carries the retailer's own label. The space available to branded products is getting smaller, mainly because retailers are actively working to replace branded lines with their own versions wherever they can. For a foreign brand arriving with ambitions of mainstream retail distribution, this is a harder market to crack than it looks from the outside.

The brands that seemed to have done their homework had adjusted their strategy accordingly. Barhi, the London-based company behind what they’re billing as the world’s first sparkling date-based mead, told Barbara they weren't targeting retail at all yet. Their plan is to build proof points through pubs and restaurants first, i.e., establish the product in the on-trade, generate some traction, and only then approach retailers from a position of strength. 

The Hungry Boar, a British brand built around Polish-style meat sticks, was running a similar playbook. They had standard retail formats, but were also expanding into small snack-sized packs aimed at pub menus. This may be a slower approach to the market than most brands but in the UK, it is probably a more realistic one.

Barbara also spent some time at the pub and hospitality section of the show, and the picture there was more sobering than the food floor, despite the above brands looking at pubs as a serious channel for expansion. The UK pub industry is under tremendous pressure currently. And it isn’t just linked to alcohol consumption declining or the new stricter drink-drive law limiting consumption to 1 pint or less.

Recent reports indicate that the average UK pub can expect a 15% rise in its business rates bill in 2027, which works out to an additional £13,000 over the next three years, on top of energy, food, and wage inflation that businesses have already absorbed. Government data shows that in 2025, 366 pubs were demolished or converted for other uses.

The category is also consolidating around large franchise operators at the expense of the independent venues that defined pub culture for generations. It is, Barbara noted, not necessarily a bad thing that people are drinking less, but it does make for a challenging environment for anyone trying to sell into it.

Given all of this, what was striking was that nobody seemed to be talking about labor. At virtually every other trade show I’ve been to over the past two years, the difficulty of finding and retaining staff has been a dominant conversation. The industry globally has been wrestling with high turnover, higher wages, and an exodus of workers who left during the pandemic and never came back. At IFE's hospitality section, it was conspicuously absent from the floor conversation.

But it wasn’t entirely absent from the floor. Barbara saw an AI robot barista – the COFE+ system, positioning itself as the sixth generation of fully intelligent robot café – capable of making coffee, doing the fancy latte art, and delivering the cup without human involvement. Barbara commented if you have the real estate to install something that size, you probably have the budget to pay someone. I completely agree.

Another interesting one was ChaiGPTea, pitching something more modest but pretty telling about the growing popularity of chai. This is an automated chai vending machine designed to bring several flavors of authentic chai using real spices to hospitality spaces, essentially doing for tea what coffee vending machines have done for coffee for decades. 

The fact that both products were there at all said something about where the industry's pressures are pointing, even when nobody was saying it out loud.

The one exception talking about staff was the Burnt Chef Project, a not-for-profit working to address mental health stigma in hospitality. The org made their point in the most literal way possible: with a giant inflatable elephant in the room. Their banner noted that 84% of hospitality professionals have experienced a mental health issue during their career. It was hard to walk past, and harder still to ignore in the context of what has been a difficult few months for the industry’s reputation. The recent abuse allegations linked to René Redzepi, the founding chef of Noma and one of the most celebrated chefs of this generation, threw a long shadow over conversations about workplace culture in professional kitchens.

The products that were the most interesting at IFE shared something that nobody on the floor was consciously flagging. These were kombucha with real fruit juice (but in aluminum cans), peelable gummies (shaped and tasting like real fruit), glutinous rice crisps, ready-to-drink chai, bubble tea. The formats may have been contemporary but the ingredients and the production all harkened back to Asian food culture, even though none of them were being presented as Asian products. 

This reflects where the UK consumer already is rather than where brands are trying to take them. It also speaks to something broader: food innovation no longer moves in one direction. Trends that take root in one part of the world travel faster than ever, and when they land somewhere new they don’t just replicate themselves. They adapt, reinvent, and sometimes improve. Bubble tea is a good example: born in Taiwan, it spent decades as a niche product in Western markets before a brand like Bubbleology took the concept, built it into a mainstream UK business, and is now engineering an RTD format that actually solves an interesting technical problem. Because agar (what the skin of the popping bubbles are made from) degrades over time, it makes sense to keep the bubbles separate from the liquid until the moment you drink. And what’s the inspired solution? Yogurt pots with the granola toppings!  

UK-based Asian food chain was there as well, strengthening its presence in retail with their product range, further highlighting the ascension of Asian food

Mushrooms are another interesting ingredient. The US pavilion had Melting Forest, a functional drinks brand leading with mushroom-forward formulations for stress and energy. Mushrooms have been moving steadily from health food stores as supplements into mainstream snacking and better-for-you beverages for quite a few years now. The UK functional mushroom market was worth over US$1 billion in 2023 and is expected to exceed US$2 billion by 2030.

Futurefoods was showing oyster mushroom chips in flavours like black truffle and double cheese. Barbara told me the mushroom crisps tasted pretty good. While the positioning of the product seemed to be healthier compared to conventional snacks, this message did not come through very strongly.

Underneath the product launches, the single biggest anxiety Barbara picked up on from the conversations happening at the edges of booths and in the aisles was the price of oil, specifically petrol and diesel. Transport costs are feeding into supply chains that are already stretched, in a market that has taken a disproportionate economic hit over the past several years.

The UK entered the current inflationary period earlier than most of its European neighbors. Brexit delivered the first significant blow to purchasing power before the rest of the continent had started feeling the pressure. Then pandemic disruptions, energy costs, and supply chain volatility landed on a market that was already running lean. While nobody on the show floor was keen to discuss margins openly, the underlying question on everyone’s mind was: do we absorb the cost increases and watch margins erode further, or pass them on to consumers whose purchasing power is already squeezed? There is no clean answer to that equation, and the people trying to sell into the UK market in 2026 are navigating it in real time.

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