Milling & Baking News - March 4, 2014 - 9



Bakers: Bioengineered wheat,
consumer challenges ahead
KANSAS CITY - Bioengineered
wheat remains almost a decade
away, but the flour industry needs
to make advance plans so that the
transition to new types of wheat is
a smooth one, said a panel of bakers
at the Wheat Quality Council 2014
annual meeting, held Feb. 19 at the
Embassy Suites hotel in Kansas City.
"I just hope that we as an industry
- growers, millers or bakers - take
the next five years or eight years to
do our homework and get ready
for biotech wheat because biotech
wheat has to happen," said Len Heflich, a baking executive who serves
as chairman of the Food Technical
Regulatory Affairs Committee of the
American Bakers Association. "If
we do our homework and do what
we need to do, I think it can be successful. Failing that - if we don't
do what we need to do over the next
five to eight years - it could be a
disaster," added Mr. Heflich.
"We all know that growers want
G.M.O. (wheat)," Mr. Heflich said.
"And there are a lot of good reasons for it. They're all envious of
what has happened to corn and soybeans over the last 20 years: All the
greater yields and, with the case of
soybeans, some consumer attributes
that are becoming available.
"I think the same will happen with
wheat, meaning initially it is going
to be focused on yield
as the driver, then we'll
get around to developing some traits that
consumers and bakers
and maybe millers care
about. I do think it is inevitable. The
world needs the production."
He added that bioengineering
will add to costs that will be ultimately borne by the consumer at the
grocery store. He said there would
be extra testing and may be segregated storage for bioengineered
wheat and regular wheat, possibly
even extra mill streams.
The likelihood that wheat will join
corn and soybeans in having bioengineered seed was just one topic under discussion at the W.Q.C. panel.
Maintaining the reputation of wheat
as a healthy food, the onslaught of
negative press and consumer resistance to food labels containing many
ingredients - including ones that
are hard to pronounce and appear to
bakingbusiness.com / world-grain.com

be chemicals - and technical advances in the industry - these subjects commanded the attention of both
the panel and the audience of a few
hundred wheat market participants
from across the United States.
Social media will continue to play
a big role in how consumers and food
companies interact, the panel noted.
Social media "can take up a brand
and it can take down a brand really
fast," said Theresa S. Cogswell, a

Education and Research

carbohydrate diets, as well as proponents of diets specifically low in
wheat because of assertions that it
causes weight gain and "brain fog."
"We have provided such great
nutrition, such wonderful things to
the health and welfare of this country, and all we're doing is playing
defense," Ms. Cogswell said.
In the next 10 years, there is going to be more pressure on baking
companies to offer cleaner labels,
including information about genetic
modifications, if there are any, and
fewer ingredients in products, said
Charlie Moon, an executive with

'I just hope that we as an industry -
growers, millers or bakers - take the
next five years or eight years to do our
homework and get ready for biotech wheat
because biotech wheat has to happen.'
- Len Heflich, chairman of the Food Technical Regulatory Affairs
Committee of the American Bakers Association

baking industry consultant at BakerCogs in Overland Park, Kas. PepsiCo
recently removed brominated vegetable oils from Gatorade following an
Internet campaign led by a 16-yearold girl that asserted such oils are unhealthy, despite PepsiCo's previous
stance defending the oils. The bread
industry should expect continuing
consumer challenges and even lawsuits over certain ingredients or practices in manufacturing bread.
After a food blogger advocated against
a dough conditioner,
azodicarbonamide
(ADA), Subway restaurants said it planned to
eliminate ADA from its buns despite
its approval for use by the Food and
Drug Administration. (It is banned
in Europe and has been labelled a
carcinogen when baked, although
the problem chemical is produced at
very low levels that previously have
been considered acceptable for human consumption.)
Panelists said they expected the
next decade to bring more controversies such as issues around ADA,
which the food blogger said was an ingredient used in the manufacturing of
yoga mats, which led to an onslaught
of signatures to remove it from Subway's formula for its sandwich bread.
Panel members said their profession still has to "play defense" against
attacks from advocates of very low

Flowers Foods, Thomasville, Ga.
Ms. Cogswell noted that, if an
ingredient is difficult to pronounce
and a product "has more than seven or eight ingredients, that is too
many" for consumers wary about
whether their food is fresh and natural, two highly valued attributes
in the marketplace.
Mr. Moon said he expected fewer
acres will be planted to wheat in the
next decade. Consumer tastes are
changing in myriad ways. Wheat
is being turned into bread, and, increasingly, flatbreads and tortillas
as Americans embrace a growing
number of cuisines.
In order to meet demand for bread
with good tolerance, Mr. Heflich
said there is a trend afoot to process
dough more gently than in the past.
"We're starting to move as a company and maybe as an industry back
to more gentle processors," he said.
"Putting less stress on the dough.
That's going to allow us to use less
gluten, use weaker flour, flours with
less stability, and let us use less oxidizing agents and dough strengtheners - all those things add cost. If we
can go to a process that's less stressful on the dough, then that is good."
Wheat and the bread made from it
will continue to face challenges over
the coming 10 years, the panel agreed.
But there are continuing opportunities to improve both bread and its underlying key ingredient wheat. MBN
Milling & Baking News March 4, 2014 / 9

http://www.bakingbusiness.com http://www.world-grain.com

Milling & Baking News - March 4, 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Milling & Baking News - March 4, 2014