Puratos spotlights sourdough as a functional ingredient at IDDBA 2026

Puratos is treating sourdough less like a bakery romance and more like a working ingredient. As the IDDBA 2026 show approaches in Orlando, the company is putting sourdough, grains and natural fermentation at the center of its pitch, with products meant to help bakers get recognizable labels, stronger flavor and better structure without adding unnecessary complexity.

That message runs through Puratos’ Sourdough Institute in Sankt Vith, Belgium, which it opened in June 2024 as a place to “protect, research and inspire” sourdough. The institute houses what Puratos calls the world’s only Sourdough Library, and it sits alongside the company’s broader bread-flavour center in Saint Vith, where customers, scientists and employees exchange best practices on fermentation and flavor formation. For bakers, the point is not just preservation. It is a pipeline from research into products that can be used in actual production runs.

Two of those products are likely to matter most to bread makers watching the category. Sapore is Puratos’ ready-to-use sourdough range, designed to deliver natural, traditional taste and structure to finished baked goods. Softgrain takes a different route, combining grains and seeds with sourdough to give bakers an easy-to-use whole grain solution with consistent taste, texture and nutritional benefits. Puratos says its sourdough solutions can also improve productivity, aroma and product possibilities, which is the kind of language that signals a shift from one-off artisan baking to formats that can scale.

That shift is already showing up in the company’s trend work. Through Taste Tomorrow, Puratos says it uses consumer research and semantic AI to track bakery trends, and it is looking ahead to a market where sourdough appears not only in loaves and baguettes but also in donuts, naan, bagels and focaccia. In other words, sourdough is moving into the kinds of products shoppers grab every day, not just the bread they seek out for a weekend meal.

IDDBA 2026 gives Puratos a large stage for that argument. The International Dairy Deli Bakery Association says the June 7 to 9 show will draw more than 10,000 attendees and 1,000-plus exhibiting companies. In a hall that size, sourdough is no longer just a flavor cue. Puratos is framing it as a functional ingredient, one that can help bakery cases, mix lines and foodservice menus offer cleaner labels, better eating quality and more room for new formats.