The 2026 Corporate Gifting Report

Introduction: Gifting is changing. Here's what's driving it.

Nobody sends a corporate gift just because, there is always a specific reason behind it: an employee's birthday, capturing the attention of a business prospect, a client relationship that has gone quiet between projects, a thank you to a team that only sees each other on a screen. The right gift will be unforgettable but if it's wrong, it's just clutter that nobody really wants!

Every year we talk to thousands of businesses about how they say thank you, mark a milestone, or just let someone know they matter. And every year, the way they respond tells us something new about how people want to be treated.

This report pulls together industry research, HR benchmarking data and a look at our own order book to map eight trends for 2026, some confirm what we've believed since we started baking out of our small home kitchen, others are totally unexpected.

01Personalisation grows up

Printing a logo on a mug or handing out a branded tote bag used to be personal, it isn't anymore. Mintel's research into UK gift-buying found people rate a personal touch above anything generic, and buyers want a name, a message, a detail proving someone thought about their recipient personally.

We've watched this play out in our own range, individually personalised gift messages have become one of the fastest-growing additions to gift boxes and cakes ordered by businesses.

In a snapshot of our 100 most recent orders, 73 had a personalised gift note at checkout, not a niche add-on anymore but the default when the option is there.

Our analysis of 12 months of the sentiments people have gifted has highlighted six patterns that kept turning up: an employee's birthday; a manager thanking a team after a successful project; a Christmas message addressed by name, sent to twenty people at once; a professional services firm nudging a contact before a deal closes, a treat instead of a chaser email; a welcome message for someone new; and a prospecting gift for a new client or lead.

The significance in reality is that 66% of employees say they'd consider leaving a job where they don't feel appreciated (a Forbes-reported OfficeTeam survey), and Reward Gateway's global Appreciation Index found feeling appreciated lifts productivity by 43%, nearly double the 23% that recognition alone delivers. A personalised gift note costs nothing but it means so much more than a generic message or a long winded speech.

The same logic applies in a sales pipeline. A box of brownies removes the usual barrier to opening a conversation with someone who doesn't know you, a delicious gift is received and the follow up email is replied to in a completely different way to a branded mug or calendar. Multiple clients are using our gifts as a cold-outreach icebreaker and see response rates as high as 98%.

02Food and drink take the top spot

When budgets tighten, the merchandise cupboard is usually the first thing to be scrapped. Pens, mugs and branded bags are being replaced by something more thoughtful and crucially, what people want to receive, a well-made cake, a good hamper, a bottle to open with someone, a gift that they are actually going to use or consume.

Industry commentary on 2026's gifting habits points the same way, naming gourmet hampers, small-batch bakes and hand-finished treats among the categories pulling ahead of generic promotional stock, with better packaging now the detail buyers expect as standard. It isn't hard to see why. A hamper is opened with excitement and anticipation and shared but a stress ball goes in a drawer. This is the category we've always been strong in, but it's good to see the wider market catching up. We have seen a growth in food hampers by 175% year on year (March 2025 to March 2026) with personalised hampers making up the majority of that.

Analysts covering the food gifting category globally put its current size at around £27.3 billion, on course to reach close to £45 billion by 2035. That figure spans everything from festive tins to gourmet hampers worldwide, but the direction is the same one we see in our own orders, hampers outperforming almost everything else on a corporate gift list.

03The bespoke difference

Here is a number that might surprise you: over half of UK organisations still manage their gifting entirely by hand, no platform, no automation, just someone picking up the phone or firing off an email. Our partner Huggg's 2026 benchmarking of 85 UK HR professionals across 80-plus organisations put the figure at 55.3%, rising closer to 70% among smaller companies.

That isn't always a failure of technology. Sometimes the request just doesn't fit a dropdown menu: a specific product for someone with a dietary requirement, a delivery split across multiple offices or home addresses, a message that has to be perfect for someone retiring after twenty years. We take calls and emails like these every week. These are the gifts people remember longest. Software will keep getting better. But the businesses getting gifting right in 2026 are the ones who've kept a human in the loop, not taken them out of it.

Where the right tool will help is at scale without losing the personal element. Our own "Multi Address Checkout" function was built for this problem and was launched in June 2026. It has handled 1,500 separate bulk sends over the past 2 months, with an average of 4.3 sends per checkout. Each one carrying its own personal message and its own delivery slot.

The lesson isn't "automate it all away." It's that the best systems handle the logistics without fuss and leave the personal decisions to a person.

In practice, this is what this looks like; a business uploads a CSV of names, emails and addresses using our template rather than typing each one in by hand, then our system splits recipients allowing each person to be allocated an appropriate gift, each with its own message and its own delivery day, all processed as a single order. It's the difference between sending everyone the same hamper and sending everyone the right thing, without anyone on the sending side having to place forty separate orders to get there.

04Let them choose

Gift vouchers are still the most common employee gift in the UK, chosen as the default by 43.5% of organisations according to Huggg's 2026 benchmarking, ahead of a single pre-selected gift for everyone (32.9%) and cash (5.9%). Only one in five organisations let the recipient pick from a shortlist themselves, and that's a gap most businesses could close fairly easily.

Research published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology found people consistently prefer choosing their own gift over being handed something that somebody else picked for them, even when the picked option is objectively nicer on paper. That's because choice signals respect - it tells someone their taste and opinion counts, not just their headcount.

05Fewer, better gifts

Budget constraints are the single biggest challenge in corporate gifting right now, named by 58.8% of UK HR professionals in Huggg's 2026 survey. But the sensible response isn't spreading a smaller pot across the same number of people. UK trade commentary this year points the other way: tighter budgets pushing buyers toward higher-impact, lower-volume programmes, alongside rising recipient expectations for personalisation and provenance as the list of who gets something contracts.

In practice, that means one really good hamper beats three forgettable generic gifts, and a single well-chosen gift for a top client outperforms a branded note pad and pen. It also lines up neatly with UK tax rules: the "trivial benefits" exemption caps a tax-free gift at £50 per person, per occasion, which nudges sensible buyers toward fewer, sharper choices rather than padding out a list with filler nobody really wants.

06Provenance over promotion

Sustainability has been a talking point in corporate gifting for years, but the emphasis is shifting from box-ticking (a recyclable ribbon and box) toward something harder to fake: where a gift comes from. Buyers are asking where ingredients are sourced, who made the item, and whether an independent business benefits from the order rather than a warehouse three steps removed from either party.

The appetite behind this is real and measurable. NielsenIQ's global research found 73% of consumers say they'd definitely or probably change their buying habits to reduce their environmental impact, and source closer to home. Deloitte's UK Sustainable Consumer research found one in three British shoppers have actively stopped buying from a brand over ethical or environmental concerns. Packaging carries its own weight in that judgement: WRAP's UK Plastics Pact research found 83% of consumers want businesses to take more responsibility for cutting plastic packaging, something to keep in mind every time a ribbon or a plastic window is added purely for shelf appeal.

That shift favours independent, values-led makers over generic wholesale suppliers. A gift you can trace back to an actual bakery and an actual address makes a different kind of impact than one picked from a catalogue of a thousand identical options, and buyers are increasingly willing to pay for that difference. Allied Market Research puts the UK's sustainable gifts market on course for £1.2 billion by 2027, a market independents are better placed to win than anyone shipping from a warehouse.

We test this against our own customers rather than just believing it. Several of our best-selling cakes come with the option of a reusable tin instead of standard packaging, the tin turns into the household sewing kit, spare buttons, or whatever's landed in the odds-and-ends drawer. Across our three best-selling postable cakes, roughly one in five customers who had the option chose the tin over the throwaway alternative, at extra cost to them, for something that doesn't get eaten.

07Made for everyone

A gifting list of any real size will include someone who's vegan, someone who can't have nuts, someone managing something they'd rather not explain in an email thread. Getting this right isn't a footnote anymore, it's a basic part of the job. Trade commentary on 2026 gifting names wellbeing as one of the year's central themes: gifts that fit how someone lives, not a default that quietly excludes them.

We build for that from the start rather than as a special request bolted on afterwards. Our Vegan Chocolate Fudge Cake alone has sold more than 12,000 units this year, and our No Nut Flavours Mixed Mini Brownie Box has gone out in over 12,600 boxes. Nobody on a gift list should have to ask twice, or quietly eat around a problem while everyone else gets the version that was made for them.

08Choice, and cake, beats cash

If you take only one number from this report, make it this one: cash is the least effective gift a business can give, even though it's often the easiest. Huggg's research found cash scored just 20% for perceived impact on staff retention, against 47 to 52% for every other type of gift tested.

The reasoning holds up in academic research too. A study published in the American Economic Review found that gift exchange creates stronger workplace motivation than an equivalent cash payment. Separate research from the Incentive Research Foundation found 68% of employees prefer a tangible reward over a digital gift card. A note in an envelope doesn't say much on its own but a cake chosen with someone specific in mind tends to say more than people expect.

Sources & Methodology

Every statistic in this report is drawn from named, publicly available research, most of it published in 2026, or from our own order data. Where a figure comes from older or third-party research, we've said so in the text.

• Huggg, "UK Employee Gifting Benchmarks 2026" (23 March 2026) - survey of 85 UK HR professionals across 80+ organisations. huggg.me
• WeBrand4You, "The Ultimate Guide to Corporate Gifts in 2026" - UK corporate gifting trend analysis, incl. wellbeing and personalisation themes. webrand4you.co.uk
• Incentive Research Foundation (2024) - study on physical rewards versus digital gift cards, cited via WeBrand4You.
• Mintel - UK consumer gift-giving research on personalisation preference, cited via jondo.co.uk.
• Kube, S., Maréchal, M. A., & Puppe, C. (2012), "The Currency of Reciprocity: Gift Exchange in the Workplace", American Economic Review.
• Steffel, M. & LeBoeuf, R. A. (2014), Journal of Consumer Psychology - on preference for self-selected gifts.
• corporate-gift.co.uk, "Behind the Trend: UK Corporate Gifting Market Growth" (10 March 2026).
• Fortune Business Insights, Food Gifting Market Report - on premium food hampers within corporate gifting.
• Business Research Insights, Food Gifting Market Report - global market size and 2035 projection.
• NielsenIQ, global circular economy consumer research, cited via Spring Fair (14 April 2026).
• Deloitte, UK Sustainable Consumer report, cited via Spring Fair (14 April 2026).
• WRAP, UK Plastics Pact consumer research, cited via Spring Fair (14 April 2026).
• Allied Market Research, UK sustainable gifts market projection to 2027, cited via Spring Fair (14 April 2026).
• HMRC, trivial benefits exemption, Income Tax (Earnings and Pensions) Act 2003, s.323A.
• JLL, UK office attendance research, cited via People Management (29 May 2026) - UK employees average 2.8 office days a week.
• Lipman, V., "66% Of Employees Would Quit If They Feel Unappreciated," Forbes (15 April 2017), citing OfficeTeam survey data.
• Reward Gateway | Edenred, "The Appreciation Index" (2025) - global research on employee appreciation and productivity.
• Sendoso, "New research shows why strategic gifting wins big B2B deals" (8 March 2024).
• Cutter & Squidge order data (Shopify), sampled July 2026 - gift note usage, "Multi Address" bulk gifting tool, food hamper year-on-year growth, vegan/no-nut range sales, and reusable tin uptake across our three best-selling postable cakes, plus 12 months of gift-message content reviewed by theme (categories only; individual customer messages are not reproduced, to protect customer privacy). Figures are drawn from our own store and are not third-party research.