Healthier ready-to-eat sandwich bread

A Business Innovation Voucher from the Biofortification Hub has brought healthier bread a step closer.

It has supported a collaboration between AB-Mauri, Bay State Milling and the Quadram Institute Bioscience to show how flour with an improved fibre profile can deliver equivalent quality sandwich bread but with more potential benefits to health.

Dr Brittany Hazard and her research group at the Quadram Institute and John Innes Centre have been investigating how a unique starch structure in wheat alters the fibre profile of flour made with the grain.

Wheat stores energy in grains in two molecules, amylose and amylopectin, that collectively make up starch. Previous research showed that high amylose wheat flour contains more resistant starch which is a type of dietary fibre. This makes it slower to digest when we eat it, which reduces the stored energy more slowly. This lowers its glycaemic impact, potentially benefitting health and reducing the risk of developing type 2 diabetes.   

With diet-related conditions like diabetes on the rise, there is a lot of interest in developing healthier versions of the staple foods consumers favour as one way of improving public health.

Bay State Milling, a family-owned US-based milling company has developed a commercial high-amylose wheat flour, HealthSense® that has up to 10 times as much fibre as traditional refined wheat flour.

In this project, Dr Petros Zafeiriou in Dr Hazard’s team worked with the bakery ingredients company AB Mauri to develop ways of incorporating Bay State Milling’s HealthSense® flour into bread used for chilled ready-made sandwiches. The aim was to develop a bread that had the health benefits of the high-amylose flour with the same or better characteristics of the bread that consumers traditionally favour.

“Our key finding is that HealthSense® flour can be substituted up to 35% and produce acceptable quality sandwich bread,” said Dr Hazard.

This bread had a significantly different digestibility profile to standard loaves; after 90 minutes around 66% of starch was digested in fresh HealthSense® loaves compared to 73% in loaves made with conventional flour. Freezing the breads at -20°C further widened the difference in starch digestibility.

Texture analysis of bread produced in AB Mauri’s test bakery showed that during storage HealthSense® bread had improved resilience in crumb texture. Other textural characteristics showed only very minor differences in the quality of the HealthSense® bread.

Overall, the project provides strong evidence that commercial HealthSense® flour can produce sandwich bread that matches the qualities of current breads on sale. The lower digestibility also suggests the bread has potential for a lower glycaemic impact, which would be fully assessed in future dietary intervention studies.

As wheat is a versatile ingredient there’s also potential to explore the application of this innovation in improving the health profile of other bakery products.

“The successful validation of the ingredient’s efficacy paves the way for additional research to fully explore the technology’s potential within the bakery sector” said Matthew Green, Head of Research and Development at AB Mauri.

“This confirmation not only supports further development but also highlights promising opportunities for improving the health benefits of baked products.”