BEMA Intel, a quarterly dashboard that tracks the pulse of the baking industry and its suppliers, revealed that in Q4 of 2024, BEMA members appear to be bullish about the baking industry despite volume being soft overall for bakery products. 

“We’re seeing a lot of optimism in the member pulse survey following the election, which seems at odds with the difficult environment commercial baking faces right now,” said Josh Sosland, president of Sosland Publishing and editor of Milling & Baking News, which supplies commodity data to BEMA Intel every quarter. 

The BEMA Intel data dashboard comprises three parts: an Industry Indicators dashboard that pulls data from Circana, Milling & Baking News and publicly available sources like labor and energy costs to determine the health of the industry; a quarterly BEMA member pulse survey reporting supplier companies’ outlooks; and a quarterly summary of the top data points from these two reports.

The quarterly summary is free to anyone and available on BEMA’s website. The full Industry Indicators and member pulse survey results are available to BEMA member companies. Baking companies interested in the reports can contact Kelly Allen, senior manager, events and engagement, BEMA. 

Sosland pointed out the dichotomy can be found between Industry Indicators and the member pulse survey, which was fielded immediately after the US presidential election.

BEMA member companies reported that their business was positive, 88% vs. 83% in Q3 with backlog numbers remaining steady between those two quarters. Thirty-eight percent of equipment manufacturers reported an increase in bookings in Q4, up from 22% in Q3. 

This upbeat view stands in contrast with Circana data for Q4 and much of 2024 revealing the bakery product sales, particularly in the commercial aisle, are soft. 

Most categories experienced dollar and unit sales that were flat or down. Those categories include bread, buns and rolls, pastries, brownies, cakes, snack cakes, crackers and salted bakery snacks. The only categories that stood out with growing sales were donuts in both commercial and in-store bakery, brownies in the in-store bakery, and a rise in dollar sales for cookies in the commercial aisle. 

Ingredient prices also remain high, particularly for those ingredients critical to sweet goods. The devil’s food cake and cake donut ingredient indices were up 35.4% and 9.6%, respectively.

Consistent with these challenges, Sosland pointed out that grain-based foods’ stock prices were also down 11.5% vs. a year ago while the S&P 500 was up 25.2% during the same period.

“When there is soft volume on a low-margin business, a little bit of increase in the topline makes a huge difference positively and a little bit of a decrease in the topline is a challenge, and that’s what we’re seeing,” he explained. 

Sosland noted, however, that difficulties the baking companies are facing have not caught up to equipment suppliers, yet. The 2025 Baking & Snack Capital Spending Study, conducted by Cypress Research and sponsored by BEMA, revealed capital investment holding steady for 2025, a sentiment that could be impacting BEMA members. 

“Commercial bakeries have realized that if they are going to compete, they have to invest,” Sosland said. “Right now, we only have a few years of BEMA Intel statistics. Eventually, though, we will have enough data to see whether or not the health of the baking industry correlates over time with the health of bakery equipment suppliers.”  

Bakers’ appetites for investment were strong at Pack Expo’s trade show last November, said Craig Souser, president of JLS Automation and member of the BEMA board of directors, and it’s what he sees reflected in the Q4 BEMA Intel results. 

“Pack Expo straddled the election, and we would hear people say that if Trump won, they would buy equipment,” Souser explained. “We had the biggest booth we had ever had, and we were very busy with customers talking about real projects. We came out of that show with not just hope, but a high level of confidence that these projects would happen, and I think you see that in these Q4 surveys: Hope turned into confidence.” 

The member pulse survey does reflect where equipment manufacturers’ concerns stood after President Trump’s election. Trade uncertainties were a top concern for the next 6 to 12 months, with 49% reporting this as a business challenge in Q4, compared to 33% in Q3 and 23% in Q2. This is unsurprising given that tariffs were a common theme of President Trump’s candidacy. 

Only 28% of equipment manufacturers reported raw material costs as a major concern, which is down from its high of 91% in Q2 of 2022, the height of supply chain issues. Attracting and retaining quality workforce was still the No. 2 concern, but it was also down from Q3 2024 numbers. 

“The labor market is better for an employer than it was two to three years ago,” Souser said. “But we also weren’t talking about trade uncertainties two years ago.” 

As the industry watches trade uncertainties play out in the headlines, Souser said he’s still optimistic even with the realities trade uncertainties bring. 

“We’re amazingly resilient as a country and an industry,” he said. “We’ll find ways to deal with trade issues just like we did with COVID-19 and the supply chain issues that followed. I’m still bullish on America.”