BIOKET · 2027

Agoris analysis · updated October 2026

Key takeaways

• BIOKET, short for "BIOeconomy Key Enabling Technologies", is an international conference with exhibition devoted to the processes and technologies that turn biomass into high-value products: industrial biotechnology, fermentation and biocatalysis, biomass conversion, purification, bio-based chemicals and materials, food and alternative proteins, bioenergies.
• Next edition: the 8th, from Tuesday 9 to Thursday 11 March 2027, at the Palais de la Musique et des Congrès in Strasbourg. The event returns to the city of its very first edition, held in 2018.
• Organiser: Bioeconomy For Change (B4C), an association that presents itself as the leading bioeconomy network in France, Europe and internationally, formerly IAR. Partner: EFIB, the European forum for industrial biotechnology and the bioeconomy run by EuropaBio. Support: Région Grand Est. No co-organiser.
• Annual frequency: an edition every year since 2021, with a different city from one edition to the next up to 2026: Strasbourg in 2018, an online edition in 2021, then Lille, Trois-Rivières in Canada, Reims, Brussels and Fribourg in Switzerland.
• Latest results, Fribourg edition, 17 to 19 March 2026: more than 470 registered participants, more than 140 speakers, more than 80 sponsors and exhibitors including 20 start-ups, more than 2,400 B2B meetings.
• Format: plenary and technical sessions, pre-scheduled business meetings, an exhibition area sold with the sponsorship packs, a start-up village and visits to industrial and innovation sites in and around Strasbourg on the final afternoon.

Who exhibits

Typical profile

BIOKET's exhibition works through sponsorship packs: from Bronze to Diamond, each pack includes a stand of 6 to 16 m², except for the Silver Marketing pack, which buys visibility without floor space. Added to this is the "Start-up Village", where up to 20 young companies selected by application exhibit for the three days.

The exhibitors' profile follows from the positioning: according to the organiser, BIOKET emphasises the technologies that drive industrial modernisation rather than end-user markets. Recent editions bring together process engineering firms, bioproduction equipment makers (fermentation, sensors, membrane filtration, extrusion, purification), contract manufacturers and pilot scale-up platforms, research centres and regional development agencies.

Notable exhibitors

At the time of writing, the 2027 sponsors section of the official website still carries over a large share of the partners of the 2026 edition: it should be followed on the official website. The 2026 edition, in Fribourg, gives a measure of the line-up. At Platinum level were BRIGHT, a science hub based at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and dedicated to bioproduction technologies, the engineering firm De Smet Engineers & Contractors, Fri Up, the support structure for start-ups in the canton of Fribourg, and L'Oréal. Other sponsors included Axens, Bühler, Seqens, Leaf (Lesaffre), UCB, Nestlé, Sartorius, Michelin ResiCare, Genopole, Fujiwara Techno-Art, Tami Industries, GEA, Clextral, Eurodia and Hamilton. MiAlgae, flagged "Award 2025" on the exhibition floor plan, had a stand there.

The 2026 "Start-up Village" notably hosted Algiecel, AmphiStar, Fermelanta, Pyran, Primogene, Bloom Biorenewables, Seprify, Lignopure and Aleph Farms. The guide to the 2026 edition and the list of its participants can be downloaded from the presentation page of the official website.

Quality of the audience

BIOKET targets the whole value chain: biomass holders, technology suppliers and biorefineries, the chemicals, materials, human and animal food, cosmetics, healthcare and bioenergy industries, engineering firms, scale-up platforms, investors and public decision-makers.

The list of organisations registered in 2026 confirms this level. On the industry side: ADM, Arkema, Avril, BASF, Braskem, Cargill, Cristal Union, Danone, Evonik, Givaudan, Henkel, Michelin, Nestlé, Novonesis, Tereos, Technip Energies or UPM. On the research side: CNRS, INRAE, CEA, several Fraunhofer institutes, VTT, VITO, Wageningen Food & Biobased Research. On the financing and public policy side: Sofinnova Partners, Forbion BioEconomy Fund, the European Commission, ADEME. The audience is international: the 2025 edition in Brussels showed participants from 35 countries.

No third-party audit of attendance is published: the available figures are the organiser's. The volume is that of a specialist conference: a few hundred participants.

Events & community

Conference programme

The announced 2027 programme includes three plenary sessions, nine technical sessions devoted to key technologies, two start-up pitch sessions and up to four thematic workshops. The technical sessions will cover industrial biotechnology, fermentation and biocatalysis, biomass conversion, downstream purification, bio-based chemicals and materials, food and alternative proteins, circular valorisation, bioenergies, scale-up and digitalisation. The programme is also meant to highlight industrial technologies and applications linked to the Strasbourg and Grand Est ecosystem.

The preliminary programme places the opening ceremony, the first plenary session and the award ceremony on Tuesday morning, with start-up pitches and workshops in the afternoon. Wednesday follows with the second plenary, the "Scale-Up Connect" session and six technical sessions; on Thursday morning, the last three technical sessions come before the third plenary, ahead of the site visits in the afternoon.

The call for papers is open until 31 October 2026. It targets applied research and industrialisation, in principle at technology readiness levels from TRL 4 to TRL 8-9 (TRL 3 is considered only exceptionally), and sets aside both fundamental research and commercial presentations. Proposals are submitted in English, for fifteen-minute oral presentations or posters.

The Christian Patermann Award and business meetings

The "Christian Patermann BIOKET Bioeconomy Award" will reach its third edition in 2027. Launched in 2025, it is named after a pioneer of the European bioeconomy and rewards bio-based innovations at a minimum technology readiness level of TRL 4, put forward by start-ups, SMEs, research teams or industrial companies. Candidates, who must be registered for the event, are scored on five criteria: innovativeness, technical feasibility and maturity, economic viability and market potential, environmental, sustainability and governance criteria, measurable long-term impact. Applications close on 1 December 2026; finalists pitch during the event.

The "Start-up Village" is open to young companies that are at most seven years old, with capital of at most €10 million and revenue of at most €1 million, and that are not subsidiaries of another company. Up to 20 of them exhibit and up to 24 pitch for five minutes in front of specialist investors. Applications are open until 1 December 2026, with an answer by 15 January 2027 at the latest.

The 2027 programme also includes the "Scale-Up Connect" session, open to pilot platforms, demonstration facilities, scale-up centres, CDMOs and open-access infrastructures: a three-minute pitch, a dedicated table and thirty minutes of discussion with interested innovators, for only fifteen places.

The pre-scheduled B2B meetings run through the b2match platform, which is also used for registration. They exceeded 2,400 in 2026.

Community & networks

BIOKET is the international brand of Bioeconomy For Change, a network historically rooted in Grand Est and Hauts-de-France, which reports more than 480 members and a team of 35 specialists, from upstream agriculture through to the market launch of finished products. Around the conference, B4C extends the brand into masterclasses, training, international learning expeditions and market monitoring.

The partnership with EFIB, EuropaBio's flagship forum, dates back to the 2025 edition in Brussels, where the two events joined forces. According to EuropaBio, this collaboration brought a significant policy-making component to its forum. The Région Grand Est supports the 2027 edition.

Contributions are selected by the "Advisory Board" and the programme committee. Its members include representatives of nova-Institute, BASF, Fraunhofer IGB, EuropaBio, Avantium, INRAE, VITO, Sofinnova Partners, L'Oréal Research & Innovation and Braskem.

On the social side, the programme includes a welcome reception on Tuesday evening, then a networking cocktail followed by the gala dinner on Wednesday.

On site: what you need to know

BIOKET 2027 takes place at the Palais de la Musique et des Congrès, Place de Bordeaux, managed by Strasbourg Events. Entirely renovated in 2016, the building has three auditoriums of 1,800, 1,200 and 500 seats, around twenty committee rooms and a 3,000 m² exhibition hall.

From the central station, the tram (lines B and E, Wacken stop) takes about twelve minutes, as does bus line H, which stops directly at Palais de la Musique et des Congrès. From Strasbourg airport, a rail shuttle reaches the station in nine minutes. By car, take the Wacken exit on the A35; the paid visitor car park of the Parc des Expositions is on rue Fritz Kieffer.

According to the preliminary programme, Tuesday 9 March starts at 8:30am with the B2B meetings, and the event ends on Thursday 11 March at 5:30pm, at the end of the site visits. A point of attention flagged by the organiser: the dates coincide with a session of the European Parliament, and hotels fill up quickly. The event's hotel platform lists fifteen establishments: ten at a preferential rate, from €95 to €250 depending on the hotel, and five with a 10 to 20% discount, with the code BIOKET2027 required for several of them.

Registration fees vary by profile and period. At the "Super Early Bird" rate, valid before 15 October 2026: €970 excl. VAT for delegates from industry, SMEs and consulting (€780 for B4C members), €620 excl. VAT for academia, public administrations, associations and very small companies (€500 for B4C members), €400 excl. VAT for start-ups, a fixed rate whatever the period and without the gala dinner. The rates for later periods were not published at the time of writing. In the event of cancellation, 30% of the fees remain due more than 90 days before the event, 50% between 60 and 90 days, and the full amount less than 60 days before.

How much it costs to exhibit

Preparing your visit

For the exhibitor

• Choose the pack according to the speaking opportunity you are aiming for, not only the floor space: Gold includes a slot in a parallel session, Platinum and Diamond a slot in a plenary session, and the €3,000 excl. VAT workshop option is reserved for the Gold, Platinum and Diamond packs.
• Keep to the schedule for promotional materials: logo and description within seven days of signing, advertisement for the event guide by 15 December 2026 at the latest.
• For a pilot platform or a CDMO, apply to "Scale-Up Connect" before 1 December 2026: fifteen places, a short format designed to meet project leaders looking for industrial capacity.
• Open your meeting schedule on b2match as soon as you register: more than 2,400 B2B meetings were held in 2026.
• If the innovation is at least TRL 4, submit an application for the Christian Patermann Award before 1 December 2026: finalists pitch during the event.

For the decision-making visitor

• Register before 15 October 2026 to benefit from the "Super Early Bird" rate, and book your hotel straight away: a session of the European Parliament falls on the same dates.
• Prepare your meetings on b2match in advance, to identify technology partners, customers, suppliers and investors before you arrive.
• Keep Thursday afternoon for the "Innovation Tours": up to four visits to companies, facilities and innovation ecosystems in and around Strasbourg.
• Favour the technical sessions if industrialisation is the goal: the programme devotes them to key technologies, up to scale-up and digitalisation, and the 2027 call for papers emphasises applied research, industrialisation and scale-up, and allows selected speakers to present results from pilots, demonstrators or first industrial productions.

Policy & CSR initiatives

Sustainability is at the heart of BIOKET's content: the 2027 call for papers emphasises sustainability from the design stage ("sustainability-by-design"), and the Christian Patermann Award scores every application on an environmental, sustainability and governance criterion, requiring measurable benefits: life cycle analysis, reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, circularity.

This content must, however, be distinguished from an organisational commitment. The BIOKET website has no page devoted to the event's CSR and mentions no ISO 20121 certification. Bioeconomy For Change, which promotes a manifesto in favour of the bioeconomy, does not publish a CSR policy specific to its events either. BIOKET publishes no calculation of the carbon footprint of the event or of participants' travel; the conference changes city every year, in Europe and, in 2023, in Canada. Only one trace of an initiative specific to the event has been published: the guide to the 2023 edition in Trois-Rivières described measures to reduce the event's footprint (local suppliers favoured, lanyards made of recycled plastic, FSC-certified cardboard badges without a plastic holder, reusable bags, reusable cutlery at meals, screens rather than printed signage, shuttles from Montreal airport) and announced a symbolic compensation of emissions. The 2024 to 2026 guides do not repeat the list.

The venue provides a better-documented framework. Strasbourg Events, manager of the Palais des Congrès and the Parc des Expositions, states that its two sites have been ISO 20121 certified since 2019 (ISO 14001 certification having been obtained in 2013). This certification applies to the venue, not to the event. Its CSR policy rests on three pillars: reducing its carbon footprint, circular economy, and developing the diversity of the local area. It publishes its emissions, which fell from 4,350 tonnes of CO2 equivalent in 2022 to 3,850 tonnes in 2023, a 30% drop in electricity consumption between those two years and 13.01 tonnes of biowaste collected and recovered each year. It also offers organisers the chance to calculate the carbon footprint of their event; BIOKET does not communicate on any such calculation.

How the trade show has evolved

Trajectory analysis

BIOKET has grown through itinerancy. Launched in Strasbourg in 2018 with more than 300 delegates, then moved to an entirely online edition in 2021 because of the pandemic, the event has since changed city every year: Lille in 2022, Trois-Rivières in 2023 for a first North American edition organised with IDÉ Trois-Rivières, Reims in 2024, Brussels in 2025, Fribourg in 2026. Each stage relies on a host ecosystem: the European institutions in Brussels, the canton of Fribourg in 2026, described in the guide's editorial as a region that has made the bioeconomy and biotechnology a development priority.

There was no edition in 2019. The in-person edition planned for 2020 was postponed to March 2021 for health reasons and was eventually held online; in the meantime the organiser had offered a free digital version, from 30 June to 2 July 2020, which it does not count in its numbering.

The figures do not describe a linear progression. The 2025 Brussels edition, held alongside EuropaBio's EFIB forum, remains the best attended of those for which results have been published, with more than 600 participants; Fribourg reports more than 470 registered participants in 2026, without the counting basis of the two figures being specified. Over the same period, B2B meetings rose sharply (from 1,290 to more than 2,400) and sponsors and exhibitors barely (from 77 to more than 80); the comparison of audiences remains uncertain.

The return to Strasbourg in 2027 closes a loop: for its 8th edition, BIOKET returns to its birthplace, with the support of the Région Grand Est and a programme meant to showcase the regional ecosystem. For a French equipment maker or contract manufacturer, it is an opportunity to meet this community without a long journey: three of the six in-person editions were held outside France.

The dates and venue of the 2028 edition had not been announced at the time of writing.

All data without an explicit source comes from the organiser's website.

Unless otherwise stated, all factual data in this listing comes from the organiser's official website (bioket.tech).