AgileChilli will exhibit at the Food & Drink Expo 2026, taking place from 13–15 April at the NEC Birmingham. Visitors to their stand can get a walk through of their software, designed specifically for food and drink New Product Development (NPD) and Quality Assurance (QA) teams. The team will be based in Hall 3, Stand H98.

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The Food & Drink Expo is one of the UK’s key trade events for the sector, bringing together manufacturers, brand owners, retailers, wholesalers and foodservice professionals. The event provides buyers from the retail, wholesale, foodservice, manufacturing and hospitality sectors with a wealth of information and product sourcing opportunities all under one roof.

During the three-day exhibition, AgileChilli will demonstrate how its software supports food and drink businesses from product concept through to launch. The platform brings together recipe development, costing, specification  and approval workflows in a single system, giving teams greater visibility and control while reducing manual processes.

Where compliance is critical, the software provides real-time oversight of ingredients, allergens and suppliers, helping businesses remain audit-ready while improving collaboration between NPD and QA teams. AgileChilli will also highlight its supplier approval module, which can be used independently by businesses looking to improve supplier management without implementing a full product lifecycle system.

Visitors to the stand will have the opportunity to discuss their requirements directly with the AgileChilli team. Food & Drink Director Mark Garrett will be available throughout the event, with attendees able to pre-arrange meetings to explore specific challenges and use cases. To pre-arrange a meeting, simply email mark@agilechilli.com.

Press enquiries

For more information, to request imagery or to arrange an interview, simply email Emily Liaback, Marketing Manager at emily@agilechilli.com.

AgileChilli is celebrating ten years of successful collaboration with Agilebase, marking a milestone in a partnership that has shaped one of the food and drink sector’s most capable and reliable software platforms.

Built on Agilebase’s proven no-code technology, AgileChilli has established itself as a best-of-breed solution for food manufacturers, combining deep industry insight with technical innovation and robust, secure infrastructure.

The beginning

In 2014, Mark Garrett, then leading Chilli Software, was developing bespoke software solutions for food manufacturers. His clients needed systems that could evolve with their products — but the technology was not meeting his ambitions.

That’s when an acquaintance introduced him to Cliff Calcutt and Oliver Kohll, the founders of Agilebase — a modern, cloud-based platform that was pioneering no-code long before it was mainstream.

“I saw Agilebase and realised it would let me leapfrog the technology I was considering for Chilli Mark II,” Garrett recalls. “It was a chance to skip a generation of tools and build something future-proof.”

The merger combined Garrett’s deep food industry expertise with Calcutt and Kohll’s technical and business acumen — leading to the creation of NPDtech, a product developed on the Agilebase platform, designed specifically for the food industry.

Learning, adapting, and growing together

Over ten years, the businesses have evolved steadily rather than explosively — a deliberate approach that’s prioritised sustainability over speed.

This year, the company has seen a step change, onboarding a record number of new clients — far beyond the usual — and seamlessly handled the increased demand. “AI probably tipped us over the edge,” Calcutt observes. “It’s driven customers to modernise faster, and our systems have scaled right along with them.”

Driving transformation across the food and drink sector

Over the past ten years, AgileChilli has helped food and drink businesses move away from complex spreadsheets and disconnected systems, replacing them with integrated workflows that support compliance, efficiency, and rapid decision-making.

“Now with AI integrated into the platform, customers are developing new recipes faster than ever before and making huge time savings on manual processes” Garrett explains.

“Simplicity and capability don’t often run hand in hand, but with AgileChilli they do. That’s because of its flexibility. Undoubtedly, I’d recommend AgileChilli.” Taste Connection’s IT & Technical Support Manager, Geoff White affirms.

Looking Ahead

As AgileChilli and Agilebase enter their second decade of collaboration, further innovation in AI-assisted modelling, workflow automation, and platform performance is already underway.

What remains unchanged is the partnership’s core strength: combining deep food-industry expertise with advanced no-code technology and commercially grounded product leadership.

AgileChilli’s first ten years have demonstrated the power of that formula. The next decade promises even more transformation for the food and drink sector.

We’ve made a number of improvements to agile:NPDtech over the past few months.

Here are the headlines:
 

AI suggestions for product uses

Our new AI feature will suggest uses for your products, which you may wish to pass on to your customers. For example, if you produce a seasoning blend, AI will provide a few examples of how it could be applied.

Please let us know if you would like to try out this feature.

We are working on other AI enhancements, so watch this space….

Suitability

agile:NPDtech is now able to  auto-calculate the suitability settings (vegan, vegetarian, kosher, halal etc.) for your products, based on the suitability data that you have set for all the ingredients in your recipes.

Please ask us for further info on how to use this feature

Nutrition – Energy calculations

The Energy levels – kJ and kCal – will be calculated automatically from the protein, carbohydrate, fats and alcohol figures for the product or ingredient in view.

These are for display/guidance only and (in the case of your made products) do not replace any calculated figures (from the kJ and kCal  of the ingredients in your recipe). 

Critical Path

If you use the Milestones add-on module, you may like to know that you can now flag milestones as being on the Critical Path.

We have added views which show only those milestones flagged as on the Critical Path, so that you can focus on overall progress at Brief or individual Recipe level.

Adding Ingredients to Recipes

Adding an ingredient has been made easier. You can now search on part code + part name.

e.g. ABC 123 will filter down to ABCD 1234, ABCH 1237,  ABCZ 1239, etc.

Portion Ingredient Costs

We’ve made it easier to export the breakdown of ingredient £ costs per product portion to spreadsheet, by adding a new data view specifically for that purpose.

Please contact us, if you’d like any guidance on this feature.

Multiple Brands

We now support having multiple brands and printing different brand logos in your specification documents.

For example, The Vegan Food Group have 3 brands under their umbrella and use agile:NPDtech for all three. They assign a brand to each product and the specification PDF then shows the appropriate logo.

Please ask us for more information, if you could would like to discuss using this feature.

Photos in Specifications

You can now display the main photo – as uploaded against the product record – in your Specification PDF.

This option is one of the tick boxes for choosing what to include in your specification output.

Thanks to those clients who contributed suggestions for improvements, such as those mentioned above. These include Kraft Heinz, Baxters, Pukka Pies, Jardox, The Vegan Food Group and Pieminister.