Making Bread – Always Interesting to Learn About! (from the Wall Street Journal – frj).

We Bought This Bread in April. It Still Looks Fine.

Culinary engineering has transformed this staple of the American diet, landing it in the middle of a debate over ultra-processed foods

By Jesse Newman Photography by Evan Angelastro for WSJ

WSJ – June 21, 2024

The loaves that line America’s grocery-store bread aisles are marvels of modern culinary engineering: uniform and built to last, with a shelf life that typically runs at least two weeks from the day they emerge from the oven. 

Sliced, bagged and sealed with mechanically placed clips, the Wonder and Pepperidge Farm loaves in one supermarket match those sold in another hundreds of miles away. That’s the point. Their low cost and reliable quality is the result of decades of refinement—of industrial baking processes and ingredients like monoglycerides and datem, added to strengthen dough and stave off staleness.

Those same ingredients are among the ones that have landed packaged bread in the middle of a fraught debate over “ultra-processed foods.” The term has no universally agreed-upon definition but is applied to many potato chips, cookies and frozen pizzas, and lots of seemingly more virtuous foods, like soups, cereals and packaged breads. 

Ultra-processed generally refers to mass-produced foods made with ingredients you wouldn’t find in a typical home kitchen. Most are made with whole foods that have been broken down and chemically modified, and they often include ingredients designed to boost a food’s color, flavor or texture. 

Diets high in ultra-processed foods have been linked to health problems including obesity, Type 2 diabetes, depression, cancer and cardiovascular disease. 

Thanks to industrial baking processes, loaves in one supermarket match those sold in another hundreds of miles away. PHOTO: DAVID PAUL MORRIS/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Ultra-processed foods are now under review ahead of the next set of U.S. dietary guidelines. And American shoppers are growing more aware of food processing, posing a dilemma with high stakes for the food industry, since less-processed foods tend to be more expensive and quicker to spoil.

The companies that make the spongy, unblemished loaves on our supermarket shelves are starting to change with the times—albeit slowly. Some bread makers are switching to natural mold inhibitors, using new modeling tools to predict how long their products can stay fresh. Others are increasingly swapping enzymes into their recipes in place of chemical additives, a change that could sidestep parts of the debate over ultra-processed foods. 

$7 a loaf, or $1.97?

For bakers like Jim Betts, owner of Bluegrass Baking Company in Lexington, Ky., most packaged bread is a far cry from the food that has been sustaining humanity for at least 10,000 years. 

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Bluegrass’s artisan loaves start from four basic ingredients—flour, water, salt and a 100-year-old sourdough starter passed down by Betts’s mother. Bluegrass employees begin mixing these ingredients before the rest of the city wakes, working them into heavy blobs of dough that rise for up to 24 hours before being hand-shaped, scored and fed into an oven. 

Each flour-sprinkled loaf differs slightly from the next. Each one costs $7 and can stay on the shelf for just two days. 

After that, they start to harden and are donated to local farmers who add them to feed for chickens, pigs and horses.

That approach doesn’t cut it for the masses, say people in the food industry, adding that the ingredients used in industrial baking help manufacturers keep bread tasty, affordable, convenient and consistent for consumers. Americans recently paid an average of $1.97 for a 1-pound loaf of white bread and $2.75 for whole wheat, according to the Labor Department. 

Packaged bread is a staple food around which consumers can build affordable, healthy diets, said Anna Rosales, senior director of government affairs and nutrition at the Institute of Food Technologists. She said definitions of ultra-processed food are overly broad and risk steering consumers away from products like whole-grain, fiber-enriched breads that may be more nutritious than a white-flour artisan loaf. 

Workers loading loaves of bread from an oven onto wheeled cooling racks around 1950. PHOTO: EUROPEAN/FPG/ARCHIVE PHOTOS/GETTY IMAGES

The greatest thing

In 1890, some 90% of U.S. bread was made in homes and just 10% in small urban bakeries, said Aaron Strain, a politics professor at Whitman College and author of a book about white bread. 

By 1930, the situation had reversed. The bread slicer had just been invented and taken the nation by storm, so much so that myriad human achievements since then have been compared to it: “the greatest thing since sliced bread.” Industrially produced loaves became central to the American diet, making up around 30% of people’s daily calories by that year, Strain said, more than any other food. 

Vast economic and social change drove people from farms to cities and women out of the home and into the workforce. Food became entwined with convenience: Families shopped for groceries less frequently, and at centralized supermarkets instead of neighborhood butchers and bakeries.

Bread production consolidated too, with bigger, better-equipped factories exploiting economies of scale to produce bread more cheaply and efficiently. Modern bread giants like Bimbo Bakeries and Flowers Foods have scooped up national brands and family-owned bakeries—each now sells a variety of breads from value-oriented white breads like Wonder to pricier, multigrain loaves such as Dave’s Killer Bread.

With fewer bakeries serving larger geographic areas, bread had to be delivered across longer distances, adding time, the archenemy of freshness. Grocers also began requiring bakers to collect old bread, making extended shelf life key to reducing the frequency of return trips and trucking fleets. 

Today, grocers expect bread to last a minimum of 14 days from the day it is baked until the “best by” date printed on bags or bread clips. Some, like Wonder, can last for a month. 

This bread was purchased from a grocery store in April. Its ‘best by’ date was May 17, which was 32 days before this photo was taken on June 18.

800 buns a minute

Bakery behemoths that make up the $14 billion bread industry operate at a pace and scale that would have been inconceivable a century ago, with large, high-speed factories capable of churning out at least 150 loaves or 800 hamburger or hot-dog buns a minute. Ingredients like flour and oil are piped from silos into giant jacuzzi-sized mixers, where thousands of pounds of dough can be mixed before being divided, shaped and ferried along snaking conveyor belts into ovens, cooling towers and bagging machines. 

It’s a rough, high-speed journey with bumps that can tear apart a dough’s protein matrix, the weblike structure that traps air bubbles and enables dough to rise. Let dough collapse as bread pans bounce on their race toward ovens, or sit idle for long periods, and the result is a dense, flat loaf.

To prevent this, many industrial bread makers add emulsifiers, dough conditioners and other ingredients that help dough withstand the modern manufacturing process. An emulsifier called datem, made of tartaric acid and other chemicals, strengthens a dough’s protein network. Mono- and diglycerides, made from soybean and other oils, offer softness and volume. Preservatives like calcium propionate extend bread’s shelf life by preventing the growth of mold.

“The consumer would be very unhappy if they went in for their favorite brand and one day it’s flat,” said Rasma Zvaners, vice president of government relations at the American Bakers Association, a Washington-based trade association that represents major bread manufacturers. 

Reconstituted ‘whole grain’

Federal regulators have tasked an advisory committee with reviewing evidence surrounding ultra-processed foods in the run-up to the nation’s next dietary guidelines, the every-five-years advice from the government on what Americans should eat. Ultra-processed foods have been the subject of recent Senate hearings. In a survey conducted in March by market-research firm Mintel, 20% of U.S. adults said a healthy diet can’t include any processed foods, such as chips or soft drinks. 

When it comes to bread, nutrition researchers say the industry needs to both eliminate harmful additives and figure out how to use more intact whole grains. White breads use refined grains, which are stripped of the helpful bran and the germ, leaving just the starchy endosperm. But even whole-grain loaves often use grains that have been split apart and reconstituted, reducing their health benefits.

To help dough withstand the sometimes-rough journey that is modern bread production, many industrial bread makers add emulsifiers and other ingredients. PHOTO: MAURICIO PALOS/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Cleaning up labels

Ricardo Rodriquez, a marketing manager for bakery, snacks and confection at ingredient company Ingredion, said the bread industry has historically been slow to change, in large part because it’s a low-margin business.

Some bread companies have worked in the past decade to remove chemical additives from their formulations as consumers demanded cleaner labels and simpler ingredients. In 2014, Flowers said it had scrapped azodicarbonamide from its Nature’s Own baked goods the year prior. The additive, which helps bread rise consistently, drew a backlash from some consumers after they discovered it was also used in yoga mats. 

Bread brands Arnold, Brownberry and Oroweat, owned by Bimbo Bakeries, said in 2019 that they had simplified their recipes, removing all artificial preservatives, colors and flavors from their whole-grain bread lines as part of an effort dubbed “no added nonsense.” The brands also nixed monoglycerides, datem and high-fructose corn syrup from their formulations. 

Other brands dropped ingredients like datem, sodium stearoyl lactylate and calcium propionate after Amazon’s Whole Foods and other retailers added them to lists of banned ingredients. 

But bread manufacturers say not everything can be ditched, particularly in specialty products such as gluten-free bread. 

Udi’s, a gluten-free bread brand owned by food giant Conagra, uses ingredients such as modified cellulose and locust bean gum to make its bread fluffy and chewy and to keep it from molding and “staling”—drying out, said Casey Young, director of research and development at Conagra.

Udi’s bread lasts for about two to three weeks after baking because it is sold in the freezer aisle. Young said Conagra strives to keep its recipes as simple as possible and is always learning more about its ingredients.

As bakeries have consolidated, loaves are baked in larger batches and travel farther to stores. PHOTO: STEPHANIE AARONSON

A baker’s little secret

Enzymes, dubbed “a baker’s little secret” by a recent issue of Baking & Snack Magazine, are proteins found in nature and produced in factories using fermentation.

Marketed under brand names like Gluzyme, Goldcrust, Relax-A-Do and Stay Soft, enzymes can improve flour quality, strengthen dough, and keep bread fresh and appealing-looking for longer, manufacturers say. 

Here’s the secret: Because most are denatured by high temperatures during baking, enzymes like xylanases and asparaginases aren’t required to appear on ingredient lists, though some manufacturers voluntarily label them. They aren’t considered markers of ultra-processed foods, according to a widely used classification system.

Using enzymes, industrial-scale bakers could keep making loaves that last for weeks, without an alphabet soup’s-worth of chemical names on their labels.

Enzymes have long been used in baking and to make other goods like cheese, yogurt and beer. They have grown more effective and can now solve a wide variety of problems, said Jesse Stinson, director of technology at Corbion, a Netherlands-based ingredient company.

“We’re getting much more sophisticated with what we can do,” said Frederik Mejlby, a vice president at Denmark-based Novonesis, which produces enzymes for the U.S. baking industry. 

Mejlby said use of Novonesis’ enzymes by the baking industry has doubled over the past 20 years. BestBite, an amylase the company launched last year, is Novonesis’ biggest baking innovation in a decade, and one it says helps make bread soft, moist and resilient, reducing the need for emulsifiers like datem and sodium stearoyl lactylate. Novonesis says consumer panels that have tasted bread made with BestBite can’t distinguish between freshly baked and two-week-old bread.

Some bread makers are working to switch to natural mold inhibitors. Corbion recently launched a predictive modeling tool for mold, designed to help manufacturers replace chemicals like calcium propionate with natural ingredients like cultured sugar. The tool—based on testing with nearly a dozen mold strains—predicts how long a loaf of bread made with a natural inhibitor can last on shelves before mold begins to grow.

‘You have to pay’

Government regulations or demand from consumers or retailers will be needed to prompt further change, because the alternatives to traditional additives are often more expensive, complex or less effective, people in the baking industry said. 

Many bread factories today struggle to attract and keep skilled workers, which can lead manufacturers to stick with easier-to-use recipes. Some formulations including enzymes can be particularly tricky, requiring manufacturers to more closely monitor factors like time and temperature.

Calcium propionate, a powder, is cheaper and simpler to handle and store than natural mold inhibitors like raisin juice—a thick, sticky liquid that can gum up the works of a bakery. Cultured wheat, another alternative, can be several times the cost.

Theresa Cogswell, a four-decade veteran of major bread and ingredient companies, including Corbion and the former owner of Wonder, said she spent years testing natural mold inhibitors.

“It’s just like a new drug,” Cogswell said. “You have to pay for the R&D.”

Write to Jesse Newman at jesse.newman@wsj.com

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Appeared in the June 22, 2024, print edition as ‘We Bought This Bread in April. It Still Looks Fine.’.