A collaborative venture of Europe’s leading bakery groups and grain experts, lead by Dutch research organisation TNO, aims to give bread in Europe a health turbo-boost, with a focus on the natural nutritional beneﬁts of grains, with higher antioxidant activity, more ﬁbre, better taste and an appealing emotional story for the consumer. Products are already coming to market in Germany, Italy and elsewhere.

The ﬁnal conference of the EU-funded HealthBread project this September was an opportunity to draw together the insights and technologies developed over the two years of the project – and during the HealthGrain project which preceded it – and present results in the form of added-value, commercialised wholegrain breads. These are products that contain key nutrients in sufficiently well-deﬁned proportions to permit speciﬁc health claims, highlight the importance of fermentation and bioavailability, and are already attracting new groups of consumers to healthier baked goods.

A LESSON IN TECHNICAL “TRICKLE DOWN”

HealthBread was coordinated by Dutch research organisation TNO. As consultant Jan Willem van der Kamp explains, it has led to the development of a network of technical experts, ﬂour mills, bakeries and ingredient businesses in each of the national markets involved. In Italy and Germany/Austria, some of those businesses have acted as mentoring partners for the various bakers taking part.

Arguably, the project has as much as anything been an object lesson in how to structure and manage technical ‘trickle down’ from third party R&D via ingredient experts and suppliers to small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

The premise underlying the newly-launched products is that up to now, European consumers wanting to eat more healthily have been put off by the dark colour and sometimes bitter ﬂavour notes of wholegrain breads. At the same time, they might well have been unsure what the precise nutritional beneﬁts were. They are likely to have been unconvinced by those white breads on offer with added non-grain ﬁbre.

“The most authoritative agencies say we should eat naturally available ﬁbre,” says van der Kamp. “They’re not sure about the beneﬁts of added, puriﬁed ﬁbres. For example, there are ﬁbre-related health claims approved by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) for grain products, but not for ﬁbre such as inulin.”

Lesen Sie hier weiter (PDF)

Text by Paul Gander