Specialty Malt Market Report: Trends, Forecast and Competitive Analysis to 2031

The future of the global specialty malt market looks promising with opportunities in the brewing, distilling, non-alcoholic malted beverage, and bakery markets. The global specialty malt market is expected to grow with a CAGR of 3.8% from 2025 to 2031. The major drivers for this market are the rising popularity of craft breweries, the growing demand for flavored beers, and the increase in specialty beverage consumption.

• Lucintel forecasts that, within the type category, roasted malt is expected to witness the highest growth over the forecast period.
• Within the application category, brewing is expected to witness the highest growth.
• In terms of region, APAC is expected to witness the highest growth over the forecast period.

Emerging Trends in the Specialty Malt Market

The specialty malt industry is experiencing a critical shift with changing consumer preferences, technological innovation, and increased focus on sustainability. These new trends are not only impacting the production and varieties of specialty malts but also expanding their uses beyond conventional brewing. Seizing an understanding of these changes is pivotal for players to innovate and succeed in this ever-evolving environment, with the market shifting quickly to more diversified, sustainable, and highly personalized offerings.

• Craft Brewing and Distilling: This involves a worldwide expansion of medium-sized to small breweries and distilleries that focus more on distinctive flavors, quality ingredients, and crafts-based manufacture than on mass production. The effect is a growing need for a variety of specialty malts, such as roasted, caramel, crystal, and smoked malts, which are absolutely essential in producing complex aromas, colors, and mouthfeels. This forces innovation in maltsters creating fresh and experimental types of malt to support the experimental spirit of craft beverage makers.
• Growing emphasis on Sustainability and Traceability: This trend acknowledges escalating consumer and industry interest in environmentally friendly practices from the supply chain to supply chain. Malt manufacturers are embracing sustainable barley farming practices, conserving water and energy in malting, and minimizing waste. The effect is a move towards heritage grain, locally grown, and organic malts, promoting enhanced traceability and clear sourcing. This is attractive to consumers who value environmentally friendly products and helps local agricultural economies.
• Diversification of Uses Outside Alcoholic Drinks: Although brewing is still the stronghold, specialty malts are used more and more in a broader spectrum of food and non-beverage drinks. These cover bakery items, confectionery, breakfast cereals, snack bars, and health drinks. The effect is increasing the reach and income of the market. Specialty malts add natural sweetness, distinct flavors, and nutrients with clean labels as alternatives to artificial ones, appealing to healthy consumers.
• Malting Process Technological Advances: This is a trend that entails the implementation of sophisticated automation, precision control technologies, and creative roasting methodologies in malt manufacturing. The effect is enhanced consistency, efficiency, and capacity to produce highly differentiated malt profiles. These technologies enable maltsters to adjust enzymatic action, color formation, and flavor properties with precision, making it possible to produce customized malts that match the precise requirements of brewers and food processors.
• Health and Wellness-Focused Malt Products Demand: Consumers are demanding functional ingredients and healthier options in their diet, and this drives the trend. Specialty malts, with their fiber content, antioxidants, and natural sugars, are becoming popular in malt-based health beverages, low-alcohol or non-alcoholic brews, and fortified foods. The effect is creating new types of malts that highlight nutritional value and support functional food and beverage applications, aligning with more general wellness trends.

These new trends are essentially transforming the specialty malt industry by driving it to more innovation, sustainability, and diversification of applications. The sector is transforming itself into a central driver of the craft beverage revolution and a multi-purpose ingredient provider to the wider food and beverage industry, calling for maltsters to be nimble, technologically innovative, and highly attuned to changing consumer needs for distinctive, healthy, and sustainably produced ingredients.

Recent Developments in the Specialty Malt Market

Current trends in the specialty malt market indicate an active industry adapting to changing consumer trends and technology. It is not only about new products in terms of malts; it includes better production methods, more uses, and greater focus on sustainability. The marketplace is becoming more advanced, providing a wider range of customized solutions to address varied industry requirements, especially in the thriving craft beverage market.

• Growth in Craft Malt Houses and Local Sourcing: One of the major trends is the growth in the number of smaller, craft malt houses that specialize in brewing specialty malts from locally-grown grains. This affects the market by expanding the variety of distinct malt profiles on the market and creating more direct connections between maltsters, farmers, and brewers. It supports local economies, minimizes transportation carbon emissions, and enables higher traceability and provenance, making it attractive to consumers in search of genuine, locally-produced products.
• Innovation in Roasting and Kilning Processes: New innovations include very important gains in the accurate control of roasting and kilning processes, enabling the production of new and highly sophisticated specialty malt flavors and colors. This affects the market by allowing maltsters to create an even greater variety of distinctive malts, ranging from delicate biscuit influences to dark chocolate and coffee notes, which are essential for craft brewers and distillers seeking to innovate in their products with advanced flavor profiles.
• Increasing Development of Gluten-Free Specialty Malts: One to watch is the growing research and development of specialty malts from gluten-free crops like rice, millet, and sorghum. This affects the market by creating new possibilities in the rapidly expanding gluten-free beer and food markets for people with dietary needs or preferences. It demands specialized malting steps to provide functionality and quality, broadening the market's scope.
• Greater Investment in Sustainable Malting Technologies: Current trends indicate tremendous investment from malt manufacturers in technologies that minimize their environmental impact, including energy-saving kilns, water recycling plants, and alternative energy sources. This influences the market by keeping pace with worldwide sustainability targets and customer demand for green products. It improves the image of maltsters' brands and adds to a greener supply chain for beverage and food companies.
• Data-Driven Quality Control and Custom Malt Blends: Advances involve the implementation of sophisticated analytical methods and data processing to provide consistent malt quality and to produce customized malt blends tailored to specific client requirements. It affects the market by enabling brewers and food processors to have exact, trustworthy ingredients, eliminating variability in their final products. It enables custom solutions optimized for flavor, color, and fermentability for specific recipes.

All these advancements are cumulatively influencing the specialty malt industry in making it more complex, eco-friendly, technology-intensive, and customer-responsive. The sector is undergoing a transition towards providing highly specialized, high-quality, and responsibly sourced malts that are crucial for the innovation fueling the craft beverage and artisanal food markets.

Strategic Growth Opportunities in the Specialty Malt Market

Strategic opportunities for growth in the specialty malt market are increasingly derived from meeting changing consumer trends for distinctive, high-quality, and health-oriented products in numerous applications. Targeting particular sectors that appreciate diverse flavor profiles, natural ingredients, and sustainable procurement will be critical for market participants to widen their client bases and continue to sustain their competitive advantage. These opportunities underscore the suitability of specialty malts for expanding beyond conventional applications.

• Microbreweries and Craft Beer: This opportunity is still a core strategic growth driver, fueled by the ongoing worldwide expansion of craft brewing culture and consumer interest in diverse, distinctive styles of beer. The opportunity exists in creating and providing a broad range of new specialty malts (e.g., particular caramel, roasted, or smoked profiles) that enable craft brewers to produce distinctive flavors, aromas, and colors, to enhance creativity and product differentiation in a competitive market.
• Premium Spirit Distilleries: There is a strong global trend towards premium and craft spirits, including single malt whiskeys and craft gins. The growth opportunity is to supply special malts that add complex flavor contributions, smoothness, and character to distilled spirits, for distillers to use as unique raw materials to distinguish their premium products and address high-end consumers.
• Functional Drinks and Non-Alcoholic Malt Drinks: The growing demand for healthier, non-alcoholic, and functional drinks is a significant strategic growth opportunity. The potential is to create specialty malts that may be used as a foundation for low-sugar, nutrient-dense, or naturally flavored non-alcoholic beers, malted healthy beverages, and energy drinks, riding the wellness wave and winning over health-aware consumers.
• Artisan Bakery and Confectionery: The confectionery and bakery industry presents an expanding strategic opportunity as consumers demand more natural ingredients and richer flavor profiles in baked foods. The opportunity is to supply specialty malts and malt extracts, which can be used to enhance crust color, provide natural sweetness, enhance workability of dough, and add distinctive flavors (e.g., malty, biscuity, nutty) to breads, cookies, cereals, and chocolate products, and provide clean-label solutions.
• Food Ingredients: Beyond products, the general food ingredient industry represents a strategic growth opportunity for specialty malts as natural flavoring and coloring ingredients. The opportunity exists to extract and process specialty malts into powder or liquid extract form that can be employed to impart distinctive, natural flavors, deep colors, and potentially functional characteristics to a vast array of processed foods, such as sauces, marinades, and snacks, as substitutes for artificial additives.

These growth opportunities through strategic growth are significantly influencing the specialty malt industry by propelling diversification, stimulating innovation in malt processing, and promoting tighter integrations throughout different food and beverage sectors. The industry is transforming into a more diversified provider of high-value ingredients, making specialty malts key ingredients for product differentiation and meeting a wider range of consumer tastes.

Specialty Malt Market Driver and Challenges

The specialty malt industry is inherently governed by an active interaction of potent drivers and noteworthy challenges, born from shifting consumer tastes, swift malting technology advancements, changing global economies, and agricultural conditions. Together, these drivers shape the market growth, competitive forces, and strategic actions of maltsters. Ample insight into these drivers is critical in navigating this complex and ever-changing environment.

The factors responsible for driving the specialty malt market include:

1. Increasing Demand for Craft and Premium Drinks: One of the key drivers is the ongoing worldwide trend towards an increase in craft beer, craft spirits, and premium soft drinks. Such brands are highly dependent on specialty malts to formulate distinctive taste profiles, colors, and aromas, directly fueling demand for an increased array of specialized malt ingredients from maltsters.

2. Increased Consumer Demand for Natural and Clean-Label Ingredients: Consumers are becoming more interested in natural, wholesome, and transparent ingredients in foods and beverages. Specialty malts, which are extracted from natural grains, provide inherent flavor, color, and nutritional value, making them perfect clean-label substitutes for artificial ingredients, and hence fueling their adoption across food applications.

3. Health and Wellness Trends: The increasing consumer interest in health and wellness is a powerful driver. Specialty malts add to functional foods and beverages because they contain natural sugars, antioxidants, and fiber. This trend drives the consumption of malts that can add to the nutritional content of products, for example, malted health beverages or used as a foundation for low-alcohol and non-alcoholic beverages.

4. Food and Beverage Formulation Innovation: Food and beverage companies continuously innovate to develop new and unique food and beverage products. Specialty malts deliver distinctive sensory characteristics (flavor, color, texture) that support differentiation of products. Food scientists and brewers' ongoing search for innovative formulations fuels demand for specialized and bespoke malt types.

5. Growth of Food Processing and Bakery Industries: In addition to beverages, the expansion of the world food processing and bakery industries is another impetus. Specialty malts are being utilized more in breads, pastries, snacks, and cereals to enhance texture, increase shelf life, and provide natural sweetness and richness of flavor, all adding to a more varied market for malt products.

Challenges in the specialty malt market are:

1. Raw Material Price Volatility (Barley): One of the biggest challenges is raw material price fluctuation and availability, mainly barley, which is prone to weather patterns, geopolitical influences, and worldwide supply-demand forces. Raw material price volatility directly affects the cost of production and profitability of specialty malt manufacturers, thus hindering long-term pricing and planning.

2. Influence of Climate Change on Grain Yield and Quality: Climate change, which results in unstable weather conditions, drought, or too much rain, is a major risk to barley yields as well as quality. This affects the consistency and availability of appropriate raw materials for specialty malting, which can cause supply chain disturbances and increased expenses.

3. High Quality and Consistency Standards: Specialty malt production calls for very precise malting, roasting, and kilning operations to develop high-quality flavor, color, and enzymatic levels. Consistent quality and achieving high standards of specification throughout batches can be technologically difficult and costly, entailing sophisticated equipment and skills.

The aggregate effect of these drivers and challenges to the specialty malt market is one of enormous opportunity and inextricable complexity. Although strong demand within the craft beverage sector and diversified food uses propel expansion, the market must always contend with raw material volatility, environmentally caused pressures, and the uncompromising requirements of quality assurance. All of this demands persistent innovation, sustainable processes, and strong supply chain resiliency for long-term market growth.

List of Specialty Malt Companies

Companies in the market compete on the basis of product quality offered. Major players in this market focus on expanding their manufacturing facilities, R&D investments, infrastructural development, and leverage integration opportunities across the value chain. With these strategies specialty malt companies cater increasing demand, ensure competitive effectiveness, develop innovative products & technologies, reduce production costs, and expand their customer base. Some of the specialty malt companies profiled in this report include-

• Cargill
• GrainCorp
• Axereal
• Soufflet Group
• Malteurop
• Agraria
• Viking Malt
• Ireks
• Simpsons Malt
• Barmalt Malting India

Specialty Malt Market by Segment

The study includes a forecast for the global specialty malt market by type, application, and region.

Specialty Malt Market by Type [Value from 2019 to 2031]:

• Roasted Malt
• Crystal Malt
• Dark Malt

Specialty Malt Market by Application [Value from 2019 to 2031]:

• Brewing
• Distilling
• Non-Alcoholic Malted Beverages
• Bakery

Specialty Malt Market by Region [Value from 2019 to 2031]:

• North America
• Europe
• Asia Pacific
• The Rest of the World

Country Wise Outlook for the Specialty Malt Market

The specialty malt industry is presently witnessing dynamic expansion, in large part driven by a worldwide explosion in the craft beverage market, especially craft beer and craft spirits. Buyers are gravitating toward distinctive flavor profiles, high-end ingredients, and products with defined origin, which is propelling demand for a wide variety of specialty malts. In addition to alcoholic drinks, the market is also growing into new uses in the food and non-alcoholic beverage industries, driven by health and wellness trends and demand for natural, functional ingredients. Advances in malting technologies and an increasing focus on sustainability further define this changing landscape.

• United States: The United States specialty malt industry is largely driven by the booming craft brewing industry, which continues to seek innovative and varied malt styles. Trends recently include heightened emphasis on regionally sourced and heritage grains, in keeping with consumer demand for authenticity as well as for supporting local agriculture. Additional investment also goes into sustainable malting methodologies and exploration of distinctive malt profiles to meet experimental brewers' demands and the growing non-alcoholic malt drink market.
• China: Thr Chinese domestic specialty malt market is witnessing significant growth, fueled by a growing consumer base with rising disposable incomes and an expanding interest in craft beer and Western-style baked foods. Recent trends involve efforts to enhance domestic malting capacity and technology to keep pace with growing demand. Although still dependent on imports for some specialty malts, there is a movement toward building local capabilities and new uses beyond the traditional brew, including in health-oriented food products.
• Germany: The German specialty malt industry continues its long-standing tradition of quality and precision in support of its world-famous brewing industry and, increasingly, global markets. Recent trends feature ongoing focus on sustainable production methods, such as energy efficiency and lower water usage in malting. German maltsters are also developing new malt styles to respond to the diverse requirements of both traditional brewers and the expanding international craft brewing movement, yet at a high level of quality control.
• India: The Indian specialty malt market is seeing strong growth, driven mainly by the exploding malted food drinks segment and a fledgling but burgeoning craft beer industry. On a recent development front, there has been rising demand for specialty malts in health and wellness beverages and bakery uses, spurred by rising disposable incomes and urbanization. Although local production is driven by mainstream malts, there is a rising importation of specialty varieties to serve premium segments and product innovations.
• Japan: The Japanese specialty malt industry is dominated by high demand for quality and consistency, which primarily complements its established beer and whiskey sectors. Recent trends indicate an ongoing endeavor to use high-quality imported specialty malts, especially for high-end craft beers and single malt whiskies. There is also a growing interest in indigenous barley types and new malting technology for producing distinctive local flavor profiles with meticulous standards for production and procurement.

Features of the Global Specialty Malt Market

• Market Size Estimates: Specialty malt market size estimation in terms of value ($B).
• Trend and Forecast Analysis: Market trends (2019 to 2024) and forecast (2025 to 2031) by various segments and regions.
• Segmentation Analysis: Specialty malt market size by type, application, and region in terms of value ($B).
• Regional Analysis: Specialty malt market breakdown by North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Rest of the World.
• Growth Opportunities: Analysis of growth opportunities in different type, application, and regions for the specialty malt market.
• Strategic Analysis: This includes M&A, new product development, and competitive landscape of the specialty malt market.

Analysis of competitive intensity of the industry based on Porter's Five Forces model.

This report answers following 11 key questions:

• Q.1. What are some of the most promising, high-growth opportunities for the specialty malt market by type (roasted malt, crystal malt, and dark malt), application (brewing, distilling, non-alcoholic malted beverages, and bakery), and region (North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Rest of the World)?
• Q.2. Which segments will grow at a faster pace and why?
• Q.3. Which region will grow at a faster pace and why?
• Q.4. What are the key factors affecting market dynamics? What are the key challenges and business risks in this market?
• Q.5. What are the business risks and competitive threats in this market?
• Q.6. What are the emerging trends in this market and the reasons behind them?
• Q.7. What are some of the changing demands of customers in the market?
• Q.8. What are the new developments in the market? Which companies are leading these developments?
• Q.9. Who are the major players in this market? What strategic initiatives are key players pursuing for business growth?
• Q.10. What are some of the competing products in this market and how big of a threat do they pose for loss of market share by material or product substitution?
• Q.11. What M&A activity has occurred in the last 5 years and what has its impact been on the industry?