11 Jul Convention 2025 Reflection: BEMA Intel

BEMA Intel provides critical business intelligence to improve your decision-making capabilities. Three components make up BEMA Intel: a quarterly industry summary that focuses on macroeconomic trends affecting the baking industry, an industry indicators report that provides users with detailed current and historical trends, and the Pulse survey, a confidential survey that highlights industry outlooks, company outlooks, and top business challenges.

Over the course of several informational interviews during Convention programming, Charlotte Atchley, Editor, Sosland Publishing, chatted with BEMA members about how they utilize BEMA Intel in their businesses.

Understanding the market

Audrey St. Onge, president of Lallemand Baking and a member of the BEMA board of directors, told convention-goers that she appreciates the ease of access and uses BEMA Intel to validate some of the trends she has been following.

“Data is everywhere,” she says. “As we all know, reports come in from several versions of things, but BEMA Intel really is the validation spot of what you read and then you go see the data on the dashboards. It gives us that information conduit that helps us understand where the market is actually going. It has a lot of the retail information, the scanning of every SKU that comes through the checkpoints; therefore you’re able to see where sales of bread, buns, pizza, cakes, snack rolls, etc. take place.”

Detailed information

Todd Oelschlager, VP of bakery sales at Corbon, appreciates the depth of the data available through BEMA Intel.

“We don’t use it like a daily report,” he says. “It comes out quarterly and gives a great snapshot of the study – what’s in the market, other volume change, price changes, those kinds of things. And those volume and price changes are by category and even by section of the supermarket, so you can see bread sales on the commercial aisle versus instore bakery volume and dollar sale changes on a quarterly and annual basis. So that’s pretty exciting.”

Avoiding blind spots

Getting a bird’s eye view of the industry helps Jason Ward, president and CEO of AMF Bakery Systems, to better evaluate his company’s position in the market.

“I have found that BEMA Intel is a really powerful kind of calibration tool to look at what we think we know about the current market conditions and, more importantly, what we think is coming ahead and compare that to what the industry in aggregate is seeing,” he said. “And obviously, the more aligned we are with what the industry is seeing, the more confidence we can have in our business plans.”

That type of information informs decision-making.

“Either it’s going to reinforce what we think we know, or it’s going to expose a blind spot,” he said.

BEMA Intel data and reports are complimentary for BEMA member companies. Non-members can access snapshots of the quarterly report on the BEMA website.