Airport Experience® News - Post-Conference Issue 2025

TRENDS AND TECHNOLOGY Two AXC Sessions Capture Cutting-Edge Developments In Airports And Concessions

BY SALLY KRAL

Back by popular demand, the Trends Mixer session offered the stage to subject matter experts who shared their insights on the latest trends, innovations, strategies and best practices in the aviation industry. This year’s session included presentations covering food and beverage trends, social entrepreneurship, the importance of data collection and more. The first presentation, “Culinary Horizons: Decoding Flavor Patterns for Tomorrow’s Airport Menus,” came from Suzy Badaracco, president of Culinary Tides, Inc. Badaracco said her team looks at “about 17,600 research reports and news items a week” to assess trends and make educated predictions looking two years ahead. Badaracco identified the four main consumer drivers of current food trends, including: “better for me,” which involves seeking items that offer a sense of control and also reward; “discovery,” which means eschewing comfort foods in favor of new, bold ingredients and flavors; “authenticity,” which includes seeking out trustworthy brands; and “story/history,” which involves favoring brands with stories that are grounding and increase loyalty. Badaracco attributes these drivers to coming out on the other side of Covid 19. “Our fear set point has been raised to a higher level so we are less reactive…we are cautious, but we’re not emotionally shutting down…so risk taking is tempered, but remains strong,” she said. Looking ahead, Badaracco noted several key food trends, including alcohol consumption increasing, functional and exotic beverage add-ins going up, snacking and plant-forward food rising in popularity

as inflation worsens and flavor exploration across food and beverage continuing to climb. And she ended by advising the audience, “spend more time researching a trend’s longevity and trajectory than worrying about what your competitors are doing. After all, they may be idiots.” Next, with his presentation titled “ReachTV Connect: Uniting The Airport Marketplace,” Lynnwood Bibbens, CEO and founder of ReachTV , presented on his company’s newly launched platform, ReachTV Connect. The platform came to be from gathering first-party data from 90 airports and more than 515 million mobile devices to create a dashboard accessible

Above: Suzy Badaracco, president of Culinary Tides, Inc.

to all of ReachTV’s partners. “This entire platform is supposed to be for all of us to use as a stepping stone to the theme of my presentation today: collaboration,” Bibbens said. “If we want to win, we have to collaborate.” He added that the ultimate goal of the project is to collectively figure out how to bring the convenience of the street to the airport. “Right now, data and technology are our greatest way of equalizing ourselves,” he said. “We have to come together as a

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AX NEWS MAY 2025