Vrac Tech · 2026

Agoris analysis · updated September 2026

Key takeaways

• Vrac Tech is the French trade show dedicated to the management of industrial bulk materials: storage, transfer and conveying, dosing and measurement, packaging, and safety of installations. The organiser presents it as the only trade show in France entirely dedicated to this subject.
• Next edition: the 10th, from Tuesday 17 to Thursday 19 November 2026, at Gayant Expo Douai, the Douai exhibition park. Open from 9am to 6pm on the first two days, 9am to 5pm on the Thursday. Free visitor badge on registration.
• Organiser: GL events Exhibitions Industrie, a company of the GL events group headquartered in Casseneuil (Lot-et-Garonne), which also organises the SEPEM Industries trade shows. No co-organiser.
• Annual frequency, with the trade show touring between three cities: Le Mans, Mâcon and Douai. Founded in 2016 in Le Mans, Vrac Tech has held nine editions from 2016 to 2025, with no edition in 2020. Douai hosts it for the second time, after 2023.
• Latest results, 2025 edition in Le Mans: 3,300 professionals gathered, 751 products presented by exhibitors, more than 84% decision-makers among visitors. For 2026, the organiser lists more than 300 exhibitors and brands.
• New for 2026: expert-guided visit trails on ATEX and on data and artificial intelligence, and Fresque de l'IA workshops.

Who exhibits

Typical profile

The offering covers the whole bulk product chain, whether solid, powder, granular, liquid or semi-liquid. The 2025 results break exhibitors down into seven families: storage and handling (16.9%), transfer and conveying (16%), measurement and control (16%), processing (15.6%), safety and environment (13.4%), filling and packaging (10.7%), maintenance and subcontracting (8%).

The stated promise is to discover, test and compare all the technical solutions for transferring, storing, dosing or securing bulk materials. The listings in the 2026 exhibitor list confirm this: handling of powder materials, conveying lines, transfer and dosing equipment, bagging machines and packaging lines, industrial extraction, air quality, explosion protection. The 2026 edition highlights three themes: safety (ATEX, explosion prevention, operator protection), pest control, and packaging (bagging, palletising, big bags).

The trade show is national with a European reach: in 2025, the three countries most represented among exhibitors were France, Germany and Belgium, and the three départements were Maine-et-Loire, Essonne and Nord.

Notable exhibitors

The 2026 exhibitor list is published on the official website with stand numbers. It notably includes AZO France, Amos Industrie, Acett, AD Pack, Adix Explosion Protection, Adventice Aspirateurs Industriels, AAF International and 4B France, to name only the start of the alphabetical order.

The 2025 results highlight, among the participants at the Le Mans edition, AZO, Amos, Chupin Pack, DMN-Westinghouse, Eurotech, Kevac, Morillon, Serva, Signode, Volkmann and WAMGROUP.

Visitor quality

The trade show targets manufacturers who handle bulk materials in their processes: cereal and food industries, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, construction, plastics processing, nutrition. In 2025, the three sectors most represented among visitors were the food industry, metallurgy and chemicals. By function, maintenance ranks first, ahead of production, design offices, technical and methods departments, then purchasing.

The 2025 results show 94% of visitors satisfied with the solutions on offer and more than 84% decision-makers. Among the companies that came to visit, it lists Agrial, Axereal, Eureden, Terrena, Groupe Rocher, EDF, Eiffage and Howmet Aerospace. The trade show's home page also states that 85% of visitors come with an identified purchasing project, without specifying which edition this refers to.

No OJS certification or third-party audit of attendance is published: the figures are the organiser's own.

Events & community

Conference programme

The workshops and conferences are held in a Workshop Area within the trade show. The 2026 programme, still being finalised, follows the edition's three themes. Pest control takes up a good part of Tuesday 17 November, with talks by BIOCINOV on integrated pest management and by ENVU on stored-grain insects. Wednesday 18 morning is devoted to ATEX, with two sessions on explosion risks linked to combustible dust and then to flammable liquids. Thursday 19 covers occupational health, with an exoskeleton demonstration workshop run by Yzytek and a workshop on ergonomics and musculoskeletal disorders.

Two sessions go beyond the strictly technical scope: Dunkerque-Port presents the European agri-logistics hub launched with the Marché International de Rungis, and two workshops cover artificial intelligence in business, one of them run by a Fresque de l'IA facilitator.

The Vrac Tech Innovation Award

Created in 2022, the Concours Vrac Tech Innovation & Amélioration (Vrac Tech Innovation & Improvement Award) rewards solutions presented by exhibitors. It is organised in partnership with Infovrac and Le Journal du Vrac, two specialist trade media, and judged by a panel combining these journalists with industrial end-users, including from Axereal, Lesaffre, Le Creuset and Solabia.

Eight solutions are in the running in 2026, including a bagging machine, food-industry conveyors, a sleeve with integrated-chip digital traceability and a fully electric vacuum truck. The winners will be announced on Tuesday 17 November at 11.30am, in the Workshop Area. In 2025, the awards went to Otexio, R. Brunone and Apsis Technologies.

Themed trails and Fresque de l'IA

This is the new feature for 2026: two one-hour guided trails let visitors tour a selection of exhibitors with an expert. The ATEX trail, led by Rhysafe, a process-safety specialist, departs every day at 2.30pm. The Data Process & IA trail departs every day at 11am; its expert had not yet been announced at the time of writing. Registration is recommended but not compulsory, and participants then get access to the VIP area.

Fresque de l'IA also runs collaborative workshops on the uses of artificial intelligence in industrial processes.

Community & networks

Vrac Tech relies on the specialist bulk-handling press: Infovrac and Le Journal du Vrac are partners of the award, in both 2025 and 2026. In 2022, an area dedicated to pest control was set up with Hamelin.info, a pest-control media outlet.

The trade show shares its organiser with the SEPEM Industries shows, including SEPEM Douai, which is also held at Gayant Expo and is next scheduled for January 2028. The two events are distinct: Vrac Tech focuses solely on industrial bulk handling, while SEPEM covers services, equipment, processes and maintenance more broadly.

On site: what you need to know

The trade show is held at Gayant Expo Douai, the Douai exhibition park, route de Tournai. The organiser justifies the choice of Douai by its position close to Lille, at the crossroads of Paris and London and near Belgium, and by an industrial catchment area where the food, chemicals, automotive and metallurgy sectors sit side by side.

By car, the venue is very accessible from the A2 motorway, eight minutes from the town centre, and parking is free. By bus, lines 3, 7, 13 and 16 serve the Gayant Expo stop. By air, Lille-Lesquin airport is 30 to 40 minutes away by car, or reachable by regional train (TER) from Lille.

Opening hours: 9am to 6pm on Tuesday 17 and Wednesday 18 November 2026, 9am to 5pm on Thursday 19 November. The visitor badge is free, to be booked online. The sales team's contact details are on the official website's Contact page.

What it costs to exhibit

Preparing your visit

For exhibitors

• Contact the organiser in advance if your offering relates to ATEX or data: the themed trails only pass through a selection of exhibitors, and they draw visitors who have come with a specific problem to solve.
• Prepare a working demonstration: visitors are mostly maintenance and production people, who want to see the machine running.
• Consider entering the award for the following edition: entries for 2026 closed on 24 September, and the prize-giving takes place at the opening of the show.
• Adapt your pitch to the local catchment area: in Douai, food, chemicals, metallurgy and automotive carry significant weight, and the proximity of Belgium widens the prospecting area.

For visiting decision-makers

• Arrive with a specification: on such a specialised trade show, comparing three or four suppliers in the same equipment family can be done in one morning.
• Sign up for a themed trail, ATEX or Data Process & IA, if your project relates to either of these topics.
• Check the exhibitor list by activity in advance, filterable on the official website.
• Plan for Tuesday for pest control or Wednesday morning for ATEX, according to the Workshop Area programme.

Policy & CSR initiatives

The Vrac Tech website has no section devoted to the environment or corporate social responsibility, and makes no mention of any ISO 20121 certification specific to the trade show. The trade show's content nonetheless touches on safety and occupational health, with ATEX, explosion prevention, exoskeletons and ergonomics on the 2026 programme, and the organiser highlights the retrofitting of existing equipment, featured in 2025 in a dedicated area.

The GL events group, however, publishes a structured CSR policy, under way since 2009 according to the group, organised around three pillars: Planet (decarbonisation and circular economy, with a 4% reduction in carbon footprint per euro of revenue and 100% renewable electricity for its French sites), People (health and safety of employees, training, diversity and inclusion) and Communities (local economic development, ethical governance, responsible purchasing). The group states that 40 of its entities are ISO 20121 certified, including all its event sites in France. It does not specify whether GL events Exhibitions Industrie, the entity that organises Vrac Tech, is among them.

The venue provides no further information: Gayant Expo's home page makes no mention of any environmental initiative. No carbon footprint specific to the trade show is published.

How the trade show has evolved

Trajectory analysis

Vrac Tech was launched in 2016 as a bet by EVEN.pro, then organiser of the SEPEM Industries shows: bringing together in one place an offering scattered across many trade shows and conferences. The first edition's press kit targeted 300 exhibitors and 4,000 visitors; the show welcomed nearly 300 exhibitors and 3,109 visitors, then 8% more visitors in 2017. The show has since been part of the GL events group: the website's footer read "Even Pro / Groupe GL Events" in 2018, then "GL Events Exhibitions Industrie" in 2021.

The geography took shape in two stages. After two editions in Le Mans, a survey of 2017 exhibitors led to keeping an annual rhythm by alternating Le Mans in odd years and a city near Rhône-Alpes in even years: that was Mâcon, from 2018. The Mâcon edition announced for December 2020 was ultimately held in December 2021, and Le Mans did not host the show again until 2022, three years after its last Sarthe edition. Douai entered the rotation in 2023, an area the organiser presents as an industrial crossroads (food, chemicals, automotive, metallurgy); the sequence Douai, Mâcon, Le Mans, then Douai again in 2026 now traces a three-city cycle.

Size, meanwhile, has moved little: around 300 exhibitors originally, 350 stated in 2022 and 2023, including 85 new ones and more than 50 from Hauts-de-France at the first Douai edition. This is a show that has chosen specialisation over growth, and looks for its progress in content: innovation award since 2022, retrofit area and safety village since 2024, guided trails in 2026. Attendance figures are not published consistently from one edition to another, which rules out a fine-grained comparison.

The city and dates of the 2027 edition had not been announced at the time of writing.

All data not attributing a source comes from the organiser's website.

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