Sweets & Snacks Expo 2026 Trends: What They Mean for Packaging

The 2026 Sweets & Snacks Expo landed in Las Vegas for the first time, and the industry showed up. More than 17,500 attendees and 1,000 exhibitors filled the Las Vegas Convention Center from May 19-21, and the record nearly 500 entries into the Most Innovative New Product Awards made one thing clear: confectionery and snack innovation is not slowing down. It is accelerating, and getting more complex.

What that complexity means in practice is that staying on trend runs straight through packaging. The formats, ingredients, and textures driving growth right now are exactly the ones that put the most pressure on packaging equipment. How a product is packaged determines whether it can actually get to market at scale, stay shelf-stable, and perform the way it was designed to. For packaging machinery manufacturers like Rovema, trade shows like this are a preview of what is coming down the production line six to eighteen months from now. Here is what we saw.

Trend 1: Protein Is Everywhere, and It Has to Taste Like a Treat

The single most dominant theme at the show was a macronutrient. Dollar sales of high-protein snacks grew significantly year over year, and the gap between protein-forward products and conventional snacks is widening fast. PepsiCo debuted Doritos Protein alongside reformulated Baked Lay's with zero seed oils. Hershey's expanded its Fulfil line with an explicit nod toward consumers using GLP-1 medications, who are prioritizing protein density in every bite they take.

Challenger brands are matching that energy. Snackish built its entire identity around chips where the protein comes from the potato skin itself. Belle's Gourmet Popcorn launched functional varieties targeting specific benefits like collagen and magnesium, each with clean callouts on pack.

What this means for packaging: High-protein reformulations often change the physical behavior of a product. Denser bars, modified textures, and reformulated chip coatings all affect how products run through form-fill-seal equipment. Brands reformulating for protein need machinery that handles variability without downtime. Rovema's BVC continuous motion baggers, purpose-built for snack applications, are designed with exactly this kind of product variability in mind. Learn more about our snack packaging solutions and how they handle the full range of snack formats and densities.

Trend 2: Gut Health Is Moving from Supplement Aisle to Candy Aisle

Protein is king, but gut health is emerging as the category's next major functional frontier. The show floor turned up probiotic marshmallows (Mallow Pop), prebiotic gummy worms with meaningful vegetable fiber content (Rotten Sour Gummy Wormz), a zero-sugar caramel sauce with added fiber (Nebula Snacks), and popcorn designed for both protein and gut support. Super mushroom ingredients showed some of the strongest year-over-year dollar growth in the natural snack channel, alongside significant gains for collagen and hemp protein.

Better-for-you function and indulgent format used to be opposite ends of a shelf. At this show, they were the same product.

What this means for packaging: Probiotic and prebiotic ingredients introduce real packaging challenges.Live cultures are highly sensitive to oxygen exposure, and fiber additives can affect product flow and consistency. Keeping oxygen out and keeping the seal intact is non-negotiable when the efficacy of the ingredient depends on it. Rovema's Aroma Perm nitrogen flushing system brings residual oxygen levels below 1%, protecting live cultures and oxygen-sensitive functional ingredients from the moment the bag is sealed to the moment it reaches the shelf. Rovema's Sense and Seal technology adds another layer, detecting product in the jaw area before sealing so every bag that leaves the line is properly closed. See our full list of Rovema Exclusive technologies built for exactly these kinds of demanding applications.

Trend 3: Clean Label Has Officially Entered Confectionery

For years, consumers gave candy a pass. The expectation was that treats were indulgent, and indulgent meant ingredient lists you did not interrogate. That truce is over. At Sweets & Snacks 2026, seed-oil-free callouts appeared across chips, popcorn, and snack mixes. NKD Doritos dropped artificial dyes. Seed-oil-free snacks are gaining share in the natural channel while seed-oil-containing snacks are losing it. Avocado oil, olive oil, and beef tallow were prominently featured as swaps.

Dirty Gut Chocolate Bites (minimal coconut sugar, A2 dairy, pre- and probiotics) exemplified the new standard: indulgent taste with an ingredient list you can actually read. The packaging design community echoed this, with matte finishes and handcrafted-style aesthetics signaling authenticity at shelf.

What this means for packaging: Clean-label reformulations often demand higher-barrier film structures to compensate for the removal of preservatives, and the integrity of that barrier starts with seal quality. Rovema's BVC Flex platform supports a wide range of film types and structures, including the high-barrier laminates that clean-label confectionery and snack products increasingly require. We covered machine flexibility in detail in our blog: VFFS Machine Flexibility: Why It's Critical, Especially Today.

Trend 4: Texture and the Viral Snack Economy

If something does not look interesting in a video, it may not sell. That is the reality shaping a meaningful slice of confectionery innovation right now. Brands are engineering texture combinations specifically for shareability: crunchy shells with gummy centers, freeze-dried fruits in chocolate, layered bites that make noise and visual drama when you bite into them. Ferrara's Brach's Crunchy Chewy Jelly Beans won a 2026 Most Innovative New Product Award in the Seasonal category. NERDS Gummy Clusters extended the platform further. Swedish candy, pillowy and vibrantly colored, had a standout presence at the show, driven in part by TikTok virality.

Younger consumers are discovering and trialing brands through social media, and the physical experience of the product has to deliver on what the video promises.

What this means for packaging: Multi-component and multi-texture products are fragile. Gummy-and-crunchy clusters, chocolate-enrobed pieces, and lightweight confections are sensitive to compression and impact during filling. Rovema's inclined bagger configuration is designed specifically for fragile products, reducing drop height and product stress during filling. The BVC Flex platform pairs with this for resealable pouch formats. See our full candy packaging solutions page for the full range of options, including zipper and resealable bag styles that retail buyers are increasingly requesting for sharing-occasion formats.

Trend 5: Freeze-Dried Candy Goes Mainstream

Freeze-dried candy has been a TikTok fixture for a few years, but Sweets & Snacks 2026 marked the moment it crossed fully into mass-market territory. The format was everywhere on the show floor, and the brands showing up included Mars and Hershey's alongside the independents that built the category.

The signal that matters most: M&M's debuted M&M's POP'd Caramel at the show, its first-ever freeze-dried candy. When Mars commits its most iconic SKU to a new format, the category has arrived. Tru Fru reinforced the point by winning the Gourmet/Premium Confections Most Innovative New Product Award for its Freeze Dried Milk + White Chocolate Strawberries. Coverage of the show floor specifically called out freeze-dried crunchies as a defining presence, with products engineered for ASMR content and the concentrated flavor hit that GLP-1 users are looking for in smaller portions.

Freeze-dried candy delivers a concentrated flavor hit in a lighter-weight format, which resonates with GLP-1 users eating smaller portions and still wanting full sensory satisfaction. It photographs well. And for brands, it is a way to extend a heritage product into new eating occasions without rebuilding the line around a completely unfamiliar format.

What this means for packaging: Freeze-dried products are structurally fragile and highly sensitive to moisture. Once water content is removed, the product must be kept dry or it degrades quickly, making barrier protection and seal integrity critical. The irregular, lightweight nature of freeze-dried pieces also creates fill and settling challenges. Rovema's servo-driven IQF line handles lightweight, irregular pieces while maintaining the high-barrier seal integrity that keeps freeze-dried product shelf-stable. See our full VFFS machine lineup to explore configurations suited to this application.

Trend 6: Portioning, Value, and the Right-Sized Package

Not every trend at Sweets & Snacks pointed toward premium. Affordability surfaced as a real and acknowledged counterforce. Old Wisconsin announced a price reduction on its Smoke Stack snacks by shifting to a smaller format, bringing the retail price down meaningfully. The move preserved the product's identity while creating a more accessible entry point. Brands at the premium end are competing on distinctiveness and functionality, while value-tier brands are competing on right-sizing.

Meanwhile, the Most Innovative New Product Awards highlighted snacks built for specific occasions: seasonal formats, limited-time releases, single-serve convenience items. The message was consistent: the right package size for the right moment drives trial and purchase.

What this means for packaging: Running multiple SKUs across different channels means your line needs to switch between formats efficiently and repeatably. Rovema machines are built for versatile, repeatable changeover, producing various bag styles and sizes on the same machine with size change memory built into servo-driven components. For brands being pushed toward smaller portion pack sizes by the GLP-1 trend, the BVC-165 Twin Tube is purpose-built for high-throughput portion pack applications and is the strongest machine in its class for this format. If you are evaluating whether your current line can keep up, our blog post "Old Red": The VFFS Machine That Made You Millions is a practical guide to thinking through rebuild vs. replace decisions when format flexibility becomes a constraint.

The Bottom Line

The show floor in Las Vegas made one thing plain: consumers want function and indulgence from the same product, and brands that cannot deliver both are losing shelf space to ones that can.

Packaging is where trend execution holds or falls apart. Freeze-dried candy that cannot maintain moisture barrier integrity will not stay shelf-stable. Functional ingredients that require sub-1% oxygen environments need equipment engineered precisely for that specification. Fragile multi-texture confections that get crushed on a poorly configured line never make it to shelf in the condition the product team intended.

Rovema's engineering comes out of Germany, where precision manufacturing and long-term machine performance are baseline expectations. That foundation is what allows Rovema to take on the kinds of applications that challenge conventional equipment: unusual product densities, sensitive functional ingredients, low-density IQF formats, resealable structures that have to perform at speed. These are the requirements of the category as it exists right now.

Our single-source turnkey approach means the filler, bagger, and end-of-line equipment are engineered and tested together, so new product formats do not expose gaps between vendors. If the trends from Las Vegas are already showing up in your product roadmap, speak with one of our engineers or request a budgetary quote to find out whether your line is ready.