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A diet for digestion issues gains traction globally

By Jeff Gelski

October 19, 2021

A diet for digestion issues
gains traction globally

Studies show effectiveness of low FODMAP diet, but grain-based foods restrictions pose challenges.

Milling & Baking News

©sonyakamoz – STOCK.ADOBE.COM

Created at the onset of the 21st century, the low FODMAP diet focuses heavily on improving digestion, a trending topic, which gives the diet a bright outlook as the century unfolds. In contrast to fad diets, which often gain popularity in the complete absence of supportive scientific research, published studies about the low FODMAP diet continue to show its effectiveness. It helps with issues such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), which affects one in seven consumers globally, according to Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.


“They are typically people that are just miserable when they eat certain foods,” said Julie Stefanski, a registered dietitian nutritionist and spokesperson for the Chicago-based Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. “The goal of this diet is really to alleviate different digestive symptoms that happen when people eat certain foods.”


A drawback comes in the diet’s complexity. Grain-based foods are allowed in the diet but in a limited role. Many suppliers are developing FODMAP-diet friendly grain-based ingredients.


The low FODMAP diet limits foods that have been shown to irritate the gut and cause irritable bowel symptoms like bloating, gas, constipation and diarrhea. FODMAP stands for fermentable, oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides and polyols. The diet affects numerous food and beverage categories, including baked foods. Fructans, which are in wheat, barley, rye and inulin, are oligosaccharides.

The diet’s origins

Researchers at Monash University created the low FODMAP diet in 2005. Peter Gibson, PhD, a professor in the Department of Gastroenterology, recruited Jane Muir, PhD, a dietitian-scientist who had worked with resistant starch and non-starch polysaccharides, and Susan Shepherd, PhD, a dietitian known for her work with celiac disease as well as fructose malabsorption and gut symptoms.


“We had all played with various things, like reducing fructose and manipulating fiber,” Dr. Gibson said. “A few of us came together probably at the right time. Jane and I had both been in the fiber area for a long time.”


Before the low FODMAP diet, treating IBS involved focusing on one subject, like fructose, fiber or lactose, Dr. Gibson said.


“What the term FODMAP did was to bring all these things that did similar things in the gut together,” he said.


The researchers at Monash University developed the diet over a year or two, Dr. Gibson said.

 
“The principals were there, but it was all based on very poor data,” Dr. Gibson said. “The big turning point was when we started to get some science into it.”


Published research on the diet has picked up over the past few years.
A study published in 2016 in the World Journal of Gastroenterology found 86% of 180 patients with IBS or inflammatory bowel disease reported either partial (54%) or full (32%) efficacy. The greatest improvements came in bloating at 82% and abdominal pain at 71%. Median follow-up time was 16 months. The study involved researchers from North Zealand University Hospital in Denmark.


The following year another study was published in the World Journal of Gastroenterology. Researchers from the University of Otaga in New Zealand divided participants into two groups. The first group, with 23 participants, began a low FODMAP diet. After three months they had significantly lower IBS symptoms than the 27 participants in the second group, which then began following the low FODMAP diet while the second group began reintroducing foods into their diet. Reduced IBS symptoms were sustained at six months in group one and replicated by group two.


Much has been learned about the diet since then, said Michael Schultz, PhD, one of the study’s authors and a professor at the University of Otago.


“The low FODMAP diet has been a breakthrough in the treatment for irritable bowel syndrome,” Dr. Schultz said. “Recent research is assessing the effect of the low FODMAP diet for other indications such as inflammatory bowel disease, diverticulosis, etc. Further research into the mechanisms is also on the way.

 
“Research into the cause of diseases was initially based on genome-wide association studies, but when this proved to be of little daily clinical consequence, the focus shifted to microbiome research. Over the last few years, a close link between the intestinal microflora and a variety of diseases has been observed. This is not just limited to gastrointestinal diseases but encompasses cardiovascular, neurological, metabolical diseases as well.”


In 2019, a study published in the International Journal of Food Microbiology and involving Monash University researchers examined gluten sensitivity and FODMAPs. While about 1% of the population has celiac disease and must avoid gluten, another 10% to 15% report a wide range of gastrointestinal symptoms that respond well to a gluten-free diet, which is called non-celiac gluten sensitivity (NCGS), according to the study. Monash University researchers identified other factors in gluten-containing foods that may be responsible for those diagnosed as having non-celiac gluten sensitivity.

 
“We have evidence that certain poorly absorbed short-chain carbohydrates (called FODMAPs) present in many gluten-containing food products induce symptoms of abdominal pain, bloating, wind and altered bowel habit (associated with irritable bowel syndrome, IBS),” the researchers said. “Our research has shown that FODMAPs, and not gluten, triggered symptoms in NCGS. Going forward, there are great opportunities for the food industry to develop low FODMAP products for this group, as choice of grain variety and type of food processing technique can greatly reduce the FODMAP levels in foods. “


The validity of non-celiac gluten sensitivity was questioned in a cross-sectional survey of 147 patients with self-reported non-celiac gluten sensitivity. Seventy-five percent reported improved gastrointestinal symptoms on a gluten-free diet, but researchers observed celiac disease had not been excluded adequately in 62% of the patients, 24% experienced uncontrolled symptoms despite gluten restriction and 27% said they were not following a gluten-free diet.


“These findings typify a common scenario in clinical practice, whereby patients present with a self-diagnosis of gluten intolerance without adequate exclusion of celiac disease or other gastrointestinal disorders and, in many cases, experience ongoing symptoms despite strict adherence to a gluten-free diet,” the researchers said.


Researchers now understand the mechanisms by which FODMAPs induce gut symptoms, and Monash University has built a large database describing the FODMAP composition of food, said Jane Varney, senior research dietitian in the Department of Gastroenterology at Monash University. She added future research will focus on the efficacy of a low FODMAP diet in people with other conditions such as endometriosis (a painful disorder in which tissue grows outside the uterus), inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and functional gastrointestinal symptoms; efficacy of a low FODMAP diet compared to other effective treatments such as cognitive behavioral therapy and anti-depressants; implications of changes in microbial abundances on colonic health; the extent to which changes in microbial populations can be rectified using dietary liberalization; the efficacy of a low FODMAP diet in children with IBS; the role of new FODMAPs , including xylose and arabinose, and sucrose and dextrins, which in some people with IBS may trigger symptoms; and the efficacy of other modes of delivery of FODMAP education with examples being telehealth and group education sessions.

Reintroducing foods

The diet involves three steps. First, those with IBS and other digestive problems follow a strict low FODMAP diet, taking out all the elements that might cause problems. If symptoms improve, they move to a second step, which involves adding back in elements one by one.

 
“It’s meant to narrow down the exact food that may be triggering your problems,” said Pamela A. Cureton, a clinical and registered dietitian and a member of the Grain Foods Foundation’s
scientific advisory board.


In the third step, the diet becomes personalized. Work continues with a dietitian.

 
“It’s really a learning diet,” Dr. Muir said. “That’s how we like to describe it. People are learning which particular FODMAPs trigger their symptoms because everybody is different as to which FODMAP diet will be proper for them.”


Dr. Gibson added, “The beauty of this diet is we don’t get rid of any food groups or nutrients. It’s a matter of choosing the right foods and the food groups.”


Reintroduction of foods into the diet was addressed in the study published in the World Journal of Gastroenterology in 2016. Eighty-four percent of patients lived on a modified low FODMAP diet where some foods rich in FODMAPs were reintroduced, and 16% followed the diet without deviations. Wheat, dairy products and onions were the foods most often not reintroduced.


A study published in 2017 in Neurogastroenterology & Motility and involving researchers from King’s College in London also addressed reintroduction of foods. Among 103 participants who originally had irritable bowel syndrome, 84 stayed on a low FODMAP diet long term while 19 returned to a habitual diet. The study identified low FODMAP food products appropriate for a low FODMAP diet, with gluten-free bread being an example, and high FODMAP food products. Total FODMAP intake was significantly lower for those on the FODMAP diet (20.6 grams per day, plus-or-minus 14.9 grams) when compared with those who returned to the habitual diet (29.5 grams per day, plus-or-minus 22.9 grams). Participants who stayed on the low FODMAP diet consumed significantly less onion and garlic.

 
Breaking the findings down into categories, participants who stayed on the low FODMAP diet consumed a higher intake of low FODMAP bread, 27.04 more grams per day when compared to participants who returned to a habitual diet. Those on the low FODMAP diet ate 26.7 less grams per day of high FODMAP pasta when compared to those who returned to a habitual diet.


Those on the low FODMAP diet may consume some grain-based foods, but fermented foods should be avoided.

 
“When you have fermentable foods, they are very good for human health, but for people with irritable bowel syndrome, if something is fermentable, it means that it’s going to cause those digestive symptoms like bloating and gas that can be very painful for people,” said Julie Stefanski, a registered dietitian nutritionist and spokesperson for the Chicago-based Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.


Sourdough bread may work in a low FODMAP diet because a long proofing process breaks down fructans, Dr. Gibson said, adding spelt also is lower in fructans.


In the study published in the International
Journal of Food Microbiology, Monash University researchers found sourdough cultures in breadmaking reduce the quantities of FODMAPs, mostly fructans, which results in bread products that are well tolerated by consumers with IBS. Greater interaction between biomedical scientists and food scientists could improve the understanding about the clinical problems consumers face and lead to the development of food products that are better tolerated by this group, according to the study.

 
Other low FODMAP bread and cereal products include corn flakes, oats, quinoa flakes, quinoa/rice/corn pasta and rice cakes, according to Monash University.


Gluten-free foods potentially may work in low FODMAP diets as well since fructans and gluten often are in the same types of food. Ms. Stefanski said the keto diet differs from the low FODMAP diet in that the keto diet looks at the amount of carbohydrates but not the type of carbohydrates. Low FODMAP involves the types of carbohydrates consumed.


Researchers are working on ways to reduce fructan levels in food through the use of enzymes, said Kiarra Martindale, a dietitian and the business development and marketing manager for Melbourne-based FODMAP Friendly, which offers a certification trademark for products that qualify as low FODMAP. If the research is successful, “that’s going to be a game-changer in the FODMAP space,” she said.

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Volume changes have been seismic, while origins and destinations have fluctuated and will continue to do so as new disruptors emerge.

Overcoming complexity

Consumers may have trouble succeeding on the low FODMAP diet if they try it on their own.

“The problem is, it’s difficult to follow,” Ms. Cureton said. “It’s difficult to understand. You really do need the help of a trained, knowledgeable dietitian.”

 

Ms. Stefanski said, “It’s rather a confusing mix of foods. Many people try to do this on their own without a dietitian, or somebody to guide them. You really need someone to guide you through this.”

 

Dr. Gibson was involved in a study published in 2019 in the Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology that stated the optimal delivery of the diet requires a combination of education in physiology, food composition and identification, reading of food labels, and a process of restriction of foods and then reintroduction. The study looked at simplifying the diet by examining a FODMAP-gentle approach in which a dietitian targets attention to the changes to each consumer’s individual intake and makes allowances for dietary flexibility, such as allowing more legumes for vegetarians. The study also addressed “fear-mongering” of the diet, or discouraging consumers from following the diet because of its difficulty. Practitioners, including gastroenterologists and dietitians, who do not advocate for the low FODMAP diet likely will discourage adherence, according to the study.

 

Researchers from Monash University continue to educate gastroenterologists, clinicians and dietitians.

 

“Before the pandemic, we would be in the US every year,” Dr. Muir said.
The food industry is learning about the diet as well.

 

“It has a very specific purpose, much like gluten-free,” Ms. Cureton said. “Gluten-free was designed for people with celiac disease and gluten-related disorders. FODMAP is well-studied in its use for people with irritable bowel syndrome to control abdominal pain cramping, diarrhea, constipation. It has a very specific use that it works very well in.”

Manufacturers need to be careful about promoting their products as FODMAP-friendly. 

How to gain low fodmap certification

Two low FODMAP certification systems have been established in Australia and are available for food and beverage companies globally. Monash University in Melbourne, where the low FODMAP diet was created, offers one system, and the FODMAP Friendly Certification Program, based in Victoria, offers the other.


Susan Shepherd, PhD, a dietitian known for her work with celiac disease as well as fructose malabsorption and gut symptoms, was involved in the creation of the diet at Monash University. She then was instrumental in creating the FODMAP Friendly Certification Program. Tim Mottin, now director of FODMAP Friendly, more than a decade ago worked in digestive health clinics in Australia. His patients were frustrated by various digestive issues, like fructose malabsorption and lactose intolerance.


“We had all these patients saying ‘What do I do? I’ve got all these issues. What do I do? How do I eat,’” Mr. Mottin said.
He began working with Dr. Shepherd since he referred many of his patients to her. It took several years to qualify for a certification trademark from the Australian government. The FODMAP Friendly logo began appearing on food products in 2013. To qualify, each product is tested to have minimal levels of fructose, fructans, galactooligosaccharides, sorbitol, mannitol and lactose.

 
“It’s been massive growth,” Mr. Mottin said. “It started off slow because it was all about the education of it and the awareness of it.”


The logo now appears on more than 700 products globally, including some from The Manildra Group, Gladesville, Australia. A flour mill in Australia uses a chemical-free extraction process to remove FODMAPs (fermentable, oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides and polyols) from Manildra’s Australian-grown wheat.
More than 300 products in the United States have qualified for the logo. FODMAP Friendly works with the University of Michigan and William Chey, PhD, a gastroenterologist at the university.

 

Five steps to certification
Food companies and ingredient suppliers may achieve low FODMAP certification from Monash University by following five steps.


First, they need to establish a new account at www.monashfodmap.com. The second step involves completing and submitting an application form. The product will not be eligible if it contains garlic, onions or their derivatives, or added FODMAPS, including fructo-oligosaccharides, inulin, and the polyols maltitol, xylitol, erythritol, lactitol and isomalt.
Companies then send product samples for testing. Monash University researchers will work with companies to reformulate products and help them meet low FODMAP criteria. In the fourth step, approved products become eligible to join the Monash University Low FODMAP certification program, which includes a stamp of approval and trademarks on product packaging as well as promotional materials. The product also will be included in the Monash University FODMAP diet app. Step five concludes the process with launching of products with the certification. The app, unveiled in 2011, now is found in more than 130 countries.

 

Certified ingredient companies
Ingredient companies listed as having achieved low FODMAP certification include Ingredion, Inc., MGP Ingredients, Inc. and Roquette.


Ingredion, Westchester, Ill., offers Versafibe 1490 dietary fiber, which is derived from potatoes, and Novelose 3490 dietary fiber, which is derived from tapioca. Both ingredients are classified as resistant starch type 4 (RS4). The low FODMAP certified ingredients allow manufacturers to add fiber to food with little to no impact on texture, flavor and color, said Diana Nieto Velez, senior manager, businessdevelopment, starch-based texturizers for Ingredion.


Ingredion’s August 2019 study of more than 750 US consumers found that, when introduced to low FODMAP product lines, 68% said the products were good for digestive health and 53% said they would be very likely to purchase low FODMAP products (based on a top-two box score of “agree” and “strongly agree”).


MGP Ingredients, Atchison, Kan., has received low FODMAP certification for its Fibersym RW and FiberRite RW ingredients. The resistant wheat starch ingredients are sources of fiber used in processed foods such as bakery, pasta, snacks, breakfast cereal, and batter and coatings.


“With the increased awareness of low FODMAPs diet and the challenges in developing low FODMAP foods in cereal-based products, we see increasing demand for our products being used in low-FODMAPs formulations,” said Tanya Jeradechachai, vice president, ingredient solutions R&D.

 
MGP Ingredients promotes the low FODMAP certification through webinars, conferences, journal articles, marketing brochures, sales sheets, interviews and social media, she said. The highest interest in low FODMAP certification comes in the United States, Canada and Australia, she said.


Comet Bio, which has its US headquarters in Schaumburg, Ill., is seeking low FODMAP certification for Arrabina, an arabinoxylan prebiotic fiber upcycled from wheat crop leftovers. The fiber’s long-chain polysaccharide structure makes it better tolerated by the gut compared to oligosaccharides, said Hannah Ackermann, a registered dietitian and corporate communications manager for Comet Bio. The company’s recent clinical trial revealed consumers can eat more than 12 grams of Arrabina per day with no negative gut or bowel reaction.

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Food safety’s new age

By Charlotte Atchley

September 2021

Food safety's
new age

With new tools and best practices, the baking industry prepares to take food safety into the digital age.

Baking & Snack

AIB International

Food safety is a concern as old as food itself. In the United States, laws regarding food safety reach back more than 100 years. In 1906, the original Food and Drugs Act as well as the Meat Inspection Act were passed by Congress.

 
Food safety regulations have evolved to reflect changing times, but major themes have remained the same: understanding the safety and nutrition of ingredients, preventing the adulteration of food, ensuring truthful communication to consumers, controlling allergens and foreign materials, and keeping food manufacturing facilities clean. All to keep the US food supply as safe as possible.

 
“We have the safest food supply in the world in the US at the most affordable cost,” said Joe Stout, founder and general manager of Commercial Food Sanitation LLC. “I think it’s a precious gift and industry that we have.”

 
While many of the themes of food safety have remained the same, new challenges have emerged. And to maintain the gift of a safe food supply, food safety practices must evolve to keep up. In the past 10 years, with the passage of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), the industry has seen a complete overhaul of the country’s approach to food safety. While the goal may be the same, the tools and approach are brand new.

The kill-step validation process, developed by AIB International, the American Bakers Association and two universities, allows bakeries to prove that the oven or fryer does kill foodborne pathogens. AIB International

Getting proactive

While there have been many landmark shifts in food safety over the past century, the most significant one recently was the passage of FSMA in 2011. From the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)’s relationship with the industry to the companies’ approaches to food safety, the importance of this law cannot be overstated.

 
“Nothing has positively impacted food safety in the baking industry like FSMA” said Judi Lazaro, senior category director, food safety, AIB International. “The impact has been tremendous. Even though FSMA didn’t go into effect as soon as it was signed into law, in a way it did because consumers and customers expected more from food manufacturers. … It’s the most sweeping change in 70 years.”

 
FSMA was passed in response to several significant food safety events shook the public’s confidence in the US food supply, most notably a 2008 salmonella outbreak traced to a Georgia factory operated by the Peanut Corp. of America. The outbreak resulted in 700 cases of salmonella poisoning and nine deaths. The former chief executive officer of the company was sentenced to 28 years in prison, the harshest sentence handed down for someone responsible for a foodborne illness outbreak.
This incident signaled to both government agencies and the food industry that a systemic shift in how the industry approached food safety was needed. Rather than reacting to incidents, the food industry needed to be more proactive in preventing them. FSMA was designed to provide guidance and tools to ensure that happened.

 
“FSMA was the catalyst for the change, the enhancements, the additions,” explained Lee Sanders, senior vice president, government relations and public affairs, American Bakers Association (ABA). “FDA changed their inspection focus from a snapshot-in-time to a system that is always in place. That’s a completely different approach.”

 
For the first time, the FDA could require comprehensive, science-based preventive controls that included requiring food manufacturers to document and implement these plans. Inspections, testing and records access were new tools FSMA put in the hands of the FDA to ensure oversight, and FDA was given the ability to issue mandatory recalls in the event a company fails to do so voluntarily. Manufacturers faced other consequences as well, such as administrative detention for products potentially in violation of the law, suspension of facility registration, enhanced product tracing and additional record-keeping requirements for high-risk foods.

 
Ms. Sanders explained the new approach: “What systems do you have in place to ensure that your product is always safe, that you have the right staff trained for those critical jobs and that protocols are always being followed so that you’re confident in the product that leaves the production facility?”

 
FSMA also gave the FDA authority to hold imported food to the same standard as domestic products and encouraged the agency to bolster its partnerships with other federal agencies and those at the state and local level. While the food industry experienced a culture shift as it implemented FSMA, FDA’s new focus on partnership required a similar shift in the agency as well.

 
“I think there’s been a concerted effort for FDA to be more open,” Ms. Sanders said of FSMA guidance. “While the nutrition staff at FDA was more accustomed to working with the industry, the food safety staff took more of a compliance approach. The FDA realized it needed to change that culture. … The agency has been open to listening and partnering with us, and having framework in place where we could do that as the whole food industry was critical.”

 
She’s referring to the Food and Beverage Issue Alliance (FBIA), which is a broad coalition of more than 50 US-based food and beverage trade associations that communicate regularly with federal agencies like FDA and the US Department of Agriculture regarding regulations and guidance.

 
“Early on as the FSMA rules came together, we saw the need to bring the food industry together as a whole to dialogue with the FDA to share the challenges we’re seeing and provide an opportunity to weigh in and share information,” said Rasma Zvaners, vice president, regulatory and technical services, ABA. “We may not always agree, but we’re more proactive getting in front of issues and asking questions. I look back, and if we hadn’t had that proactive conversation and structure in place, we wouldn’t have been able to be as nimble in responding to COVID-19 because we knew how to engage with the agency and have an open dialogue.”

 
When it comes to the details of FSMA — and there are many — a few themes emerged that have completely revamped the way the food industry, including the baking sector, thinks about food safety programs. One of the most significant is the emphasis on having preventative controls and documentation that the company is implementing those controls effectively. This forces companies to be proactive and significantly raises accountability, as well as the number of audits and inspections.

 
“FSMA made all companies of all sizes think about their food safety plans, their company’s internal workings and their team’s approach to food safety day-by-day,” Ms. Sanders said. “There are a lot of audits and inspections now, and bakers have to know how to manage those and make sure they’re covering those critical points. Being able to demonstrate to customers that they are doing the right thing every day has been a big driver in all of this.”

 
Audits and inspections aren’t new to the baking industry. Before FSMA, the industry largely followed standards set forth by the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) and were audited by a third party to confirm those standards were being met.

 
“I don’t think the baking industry was shocked by what was coming from FSMA,” Ms. Lazaro said. “They were surprised by the regulatory action that FDA would now show up and hold them accountable. The industry was previously used to only being held accountable by customers and consumers.”

 
In addition to GFSI audits, bakeries today undergo audits by individual customers as well as FDA inspections and, in many instances, AIB International inspections. The focus has changed too, Ms. Lazaro — who once was an inspector — pointed out.

 
“Now you can’t do business without an independent inspection,” she said. “And they have greatly evolved. When I was a food safety inspector, that meant 75%-80% of my time was on the production floor inspection, and 20% was spent looking at records and programs. Now we focus more on the programs and records and some time on the floor.”

 
Ms. Lazaro warns, however, that this emphasis on inspections and audits could backfire.

 
“I do think there comes a time where we have an audit overload that we are so worried about the audit that we lose sight of what we’re preparing for, which should be prioritizing food safety,” she said.

 
The other piece of FSMA that will come into play next is the focus on modernization and using the technology of today to take food safety to the next level.

 

“The FDA is looking at smarter food safety through its Smarter Food Safety initiative,” Mr. Stout said. “In the age of iPhones, iPads and other computerization, it seems to me that we should be able to have a much brighter and connected food safety program in manufacturing plants. That includes pre-op inspections, recording them, tracking them. The technology has really helped us out on monitoring critical control points. You can see the information live on your desktop and know exactly what’s going on; lab results come in automatically, and all of this saves us time and money and helps us be more efficient.”

Most bakery recalls are related to mislabeling of major allergens. ©monticellllo - stock.adobe.com
1906

Food and Drugs Act and Meat Inspection Act are signed into law.

1907

First Certified Color Regulations list seven colors suitable for food.

1914

In US vs. Lexington Mill and Elevator Co., the Supreme Court bans bleached flour with nitrite residue.

 

1938

The Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act is passed by Congress, authorizing factory inspections, standards of identity and safe tolerances for unavoidable poisonous substances.

1943

In US vs. Dotterweich, Supreme Court rules responsible officials of a corporation can be prosecuted for violations.

1949

FDA publishes its first guidance to the industry, “Procedures for the Appraisal of the Toxicity of Chemicals in Food.”

1958

FDA publishes the first list of GRAS substances.

1960

Color Additive Amendment requires manufacturers to establish the safety of color additives.

1962

President John F. Kennedy proclaims the Consumer Bill of Rights, including the right to safety, to be informed, the right to choose and the right to be heard.

1971

Saccharin is banned from GRAS list.

1982

FDA publishes “Toxicological Principles for the Safety Assessment of Direct Food Additives and Color Additives Used in Food.”

1990

Nutrition Labeling and Education Act requires all packaged food to have nutrition labeling and health claims consistent with terms defined by the Secretary of Health and Human Services.

2004

Food Allergy Labeling and Consumer Protection Act is passed, requiring labeling of any food that contains a protein from peanuts, soybeans, cow’s milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts and wheat.

2011

Food Safety Modernization Act is passed.

2021

Sesame is added to the list of major allergens.

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Future is now: Incremental advances improve highly efficient, labor-light flour mills

Future is now: Incremental advances improve highly efficient, labor-light flour mills

On the occasion of its 100th year chronicling the evolution of milling in the United States and reporting on the commodity markets that feed the world, Milling & Baking News spoke with milling experts about the technological leaps, bounds and baby steps that led to the modern flour mill.

Catalysts for change

Catalysts for change

The pressures of regulation and consumer demand have led to significant advances in food science for the baking industry.

Challenges for the future

Building off the foundation laid by FSMA, the FDA announced its blueprint for the New Era of Smarter Food Safety in July 2020. This blueprint — a PDF document that bakers can find on FDA’s website — outlines FDA’s approach to food safety going forward. It leans heavily on the processes put in place by FSMA but also focuses on four core elements: tech-enabled traceability, smarter tools and approaches for prevention and outbreak response, new business models and retail modernization, and food safety culture.

 
“The New Era of Smarter Food Safety is an approach to bending the curve of foodborne illness through the use of new technologies and approaches,” said Frank Yiannas, deputy FDA commissioner.

 
This new era is ushered in by the final rule of FSMA that needs to be implemented. The Traceability Rule, currently under review, digitizes traceability and provides transparency across the supply chain.

 Companies that manufacture, process, pack or hold food on the Food Traceability List will capture required data points, store them electronically or in paper records for 24 months. Companies must also share key data elements with other partners in the supply chain.

 
“The vision for the FDA is that trading partners would be able to speak the same language through the standardization of what they are calling critical tracking events and key data elements,” said Julie McGill of FoodLogicQ during an educational session at the American Society of Baking’s technical conference earlier this year. “Tech-enabled traceability will enable companies to meet the expectations of this new era of smarter food safety and eventually get to the place where interoperability is within those systems.”

 
While previous FSMA rules have left room for different industries to adapt their existing processes, this proposed rule will call for industry to conform to FDA.

 
“FDA has been good about setting broad parameters, and individual food sectors can tweak their best practices to fit regulations, rather than FDA being overly prescriptive,” Ms. Zvaners said. “We support food safety, but we strongly encourage FDA to keep it simple. We feel that some of this may be overly prescriptive.”

 
While the public comments are closed for this rule, the FDA has not issued a final rule, but has until November 2022 to do so.

 
FDA’s blueprint also will explore using technology and data in prevention and outbreak response, but also promoting safety in new business models like e-commerce and the expanding market for food delivery. These accelerated markets pose new challenges for the safe handling of food. Some of these business models were new or nonexistent when FSMA was signed into law, and therefore aren’t adequately addressed.
While most of the baking industry uses a kill step such as the oven or fryer to control pathogens, that fatal peanut butter tragedy of 2008 has everyone re-thinking pathogens and what high-risk really means.

 
“Peanut butter wasn’t considered a high-risk food before that because it is a low water activity product,” said Meaghan Meyer, senior vice president of food safety and quality for Indianapolis-based CraftMark Bakery and co-chair for ABA’s food technical regulatory affairs professional group. “But science is showing us that pathogens survive in low water activity products, and there is a significant concern of post-kill step contamination of products with pathogens. This contamination can happen from contaminated raw material added after the kill step or post-kill step contamination from an environmental factor in the bakery.”

 
The increasingly complex global supply chain will also be under the microscope of food safety moving forward. This has become even more important considering the recent challenges the supply chain has experienced.


“The supply chain is more complicated than ever before as we source raw materials from multiple suppliers across all parts of the world,” Ms. Meyer said. “Ensuring that we have a safe, consistent supply is more important than it has ever been.”


As bakers and other food manufacturers continue to endure workforce challenges, work safety culture, the fourth pillar of the blueprint, will become even more critical. All the protocols and procedures can be in place, but without a culture of food safety, they will not be effective.

 
“The baking industry is feeling the pinch of tight employment resources,” Ms. Meyer said. “The shortage of workers is hitting us hard and causing increased turnover, and bakers are turning to temp workers to fill that gap. That leads to the need for additional training and resources to make sure that no mistakes are made.”

 
While FDA plans to work on best practices going forward, GFSI published its “A Culture of Food Safety” paper in 2018, which provides broad guidelines on establishing and fostering a culture of food safety. Buy-in at every level of the company is key as culture is a top-down initiative. Communication of expectations and follow-through are other key points to developing a workplace culture.

 
CraftMark’s top leaders are involved in the food safety teams, and every member of the bakery team must attend food safety culture training to understand the company’s priorities.

 
“It ultimately is ensuring that our actions match our words,” Ms. Meyer said. “Engaging employees at all levels of the organization to understand why food safety is critical to success and then reinforcing that through conversations and training.”

 
CraftMark follows this up with not only audits but also employee surveys to get feedback on their perception of our food safety culture.

 
“Do they feel like they’re listened to? Are they asked to compromise on food safety?” Ms. Meyer said, giving examples. “This is just one of the outlets we give our employees to report back to us.”

 
Another key part of food safety is the sanitation team, and a culture that prioritizes food safety will be critical to keeping employees on this team.
“How do you motivate the sanitation team and help them feel good about what they do because you can’t replace the sanitation team,” Mr. Stout said. “You can automate mixing, slicing, packaging, but it’s really hard to automate sanitation. So the question is how do we get those people in place and motivated to do their jobs well.”

 
A culture that prioritizes food safety will also prioritize sanitation and show the team that their work is valued. Mr. Stout also recommended bakers take on an attitude of smart sanitation: that is sanitation is the responsibility of everyone in the bakery, not just the sanitation team.
“We need to move closer to that, and that would be part of the cultural revolution that we need that FDA talks about in its New Era of Food Safety,” he said.

 
All of this comes back to training, communication and accountability, which will become pivotal as bakers bring on new employees — many of whom have never worked in food manufacturing — and move forward into this new frontier of proactive food safety.

 
“I don’t think anyone goes to work not to do a good job, and that is true of food safety,” Ms. Lazaro said. “Mistakes happen because people aren’t trained properly or held accountable. With the increasingly inexperienced workforce, I hope the entire industry pays attention to education.”

 
The future of food safety may be leaning on high-tech digital tools, but it will be rooted in the things that keep bakeries running smoothly: efficient processes, well-communicated protocols and effective training.

Salmonella was at the heart of the peanut butter contamination in 2008 that killed nine and spurred the US government to pass the Food Safety Modernization Act. FDA
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Digitization transforms commodity markets

By Susan Reidy

September 2021

Digitization transforms
commodity markets

Electronic trading technology ended 150-plus years of open outcry buying and selling and has potential to transform the grain elevator’s role.

World Grain

Photo courtesy of CBOT records: Series V – Public Relations Department.

From the sidelines of the Chicago Board of Trade trading floor in the early 2000s, Tanner Ehmke, then a reporter for Dow, witnessed the beginning of the end of open outcry trading.

 

“I was there to watch the day when the electronic platform went online and started trading side-by-side with open outcry,” said Ehmke, who is now a CoBank lead economist for dairy and specialty crops. “You could see open outcry disappear right before your eyes.”

 

The appeal of anonymity with electronic trading along with the speed, cost savings and boundless opportunities meant the technology quickly gained ground.

 

Exchanges around the world that used the open outcry system for more than 150 years closed their trading pits and pushed toward digitization. Buying and selling that used to be done in pits by traders in brightly colored jackets, holding tickets, and shouting orders back and forth, is now done around the world with a click of a computer or the touch of a phone screen.

 

“The change from open outcry pit trading to electronic trading in the last 15 years is the biggest technical change in modern futures trading in the last 150 years,” said Scott Irwin, Laurence J. Norton Chair of Agricultural Marketing, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.


The exchanges themselves developed in the mid-19th century as a central market for delivery, sale and purchase of commodities. Traders could meet face-to-face and make verbal contracts for the future delivery of crops such as corn, soybeans and wheat. It helped insulate the producers and consumers from drastic seasonal and supply fluctuations that were common during that time.


Exchanges emerged in cities along navigable waterways — Chicago, Kansas City, Minneapolis and New York City. In the following century, new technology such as the telegraph and telephone, improved trading, especially from off-site locations. But it wasn’t until electronic trading in the 1990s and beyond, that exchanges started eliminating trading floors and consolidating operations. With the CME closing its trading pits this year, open outcry for agriculture commodities came to an end.


Looking to the future and possible disruptors, the use of blockchain for trading hasn’t taken off as some industry experts thought it would. Still, digitization is having ripple effects throughout the supply chain and leading to a changing role for grain elevators as farmers become savvier at marketing their own bushels. There’s also been the birth of new technology companies such as Covantis and Agriota that seek to modernize and streamline trade and post-trade activities.

 
“A lot has changed just in the last 20 years,” Ehmke said. “I wouldn’t say the pace of change is slowing; there will continue to be new innovations that will expedite these trends of consolidation and faster and lighter trading platforms. You can bet on that any day of the week.”

Market history

While some form of futures trading can be traced back to ancient Greek and Phoenician merchants who sold their goods throughout the world, the modern globally traded futures markets have their origins in the 19th century United States, according to CME Group.


Commodity markets arose as increasing agricultural production and consumption required a central market for delivery, sale and purchase.


Agricultural producers and consumers experienced drastic seasonal and supply fluctuation, gluts and shortages and tumultuous price fluctuations, CME said. At a time when storage facilities were primitive and the markets were disorganized, hubs of agricultural commerce started to emerge in cities located around navigable US waterways.


By 1848, canal and railroad infrastructure linked the Great Lakes with the Mississippi River, making Chicago, Illinois, an ideal location for agricultural commerce. Agricultural production was shifting west of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, but the major population growth was happening on the East Coast.


“There had to be a system developed to get grain from the heartland back to the East Coast,” Irwin said. “Chicago became a major transshipment point for connecting grain from individual farmers to a central place where it could be shipped by barge or rail. That was a natural place where futures trading would start to occur. A lot of people were dealing in a lot of forward contracts because of the physical movement through Chicago.”


The Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) formed as a cash market for grain in 1848. Creation of a central grain exchange allowed farmers and grain producers to sell crops at set prices in the months between harvests and allowed consumers to buy grains at transparent prices throughout the year, CME said.


Standardized futures contracts were introduced by CBOT in 1865, introducing a level of reliability and security to buyers and sellers that stabilized markets against possible default, CME said.


“There’s always people wanting to adjust their price exposure in this forward contract market, so why not create a market that allows people to trade in and out of the long and short side of forward contracts,” Irwin said. “That’s the idea of a future market.


“The whole system developed to make it as easy and low cost and guaranteed way of trading and adjusting price exposure on either side of the transaction.”


More exchanges were formed in the decades to come, including the Kansas City Board of Trade in 1856, the forerunner to the Minneapolis Grain Exchange in 1881 and the New York Mercantile Exchange in 1882.


“Once we started creating future contracts, other ideas developed,” Irwin said. “The whole system took some time to develop. But by the 1870s and 1880s, we had pretty recognizable futures trading comparable to today.”


Within these exchanges, the primary method of trade was open outcry, where buyers and sellers were able to see and hear each other in order to make bids and offer prices. An individual could take a place in the “pit” or “floor” and engage with traders, or they could commission a floor broker who would trade on their behalf.
“Traders in the pit conducted business among themselves, while buyers and sellers of the security in question relayed bid and offer prices to their representative floor brokers,” FXCM said.


Technology impacted the exchanges and trading early on, through the adoption of the telegraph, ticker tape and telephone. The telegraph, invented in 1832, allowed for distribution of financial newsletters in areas far away from the marketplace, according to FXCM, a provider of online foreign exchange trading and related services. By 1856, broker-assisted buying and selling of exchange-based securities was possible through telegraph.


The stock ticker, first put into action in 1867 in New York City, allowed for up-to-the-minute stock quotes origination at the New York Stock Exchange nationwide.
Invention of the telephone in 1876 introduced a new method of communication and by 1920, 88,000 telephones were in service on Wall Steet. As long-distance connectivity grew, the telephone became the industry standard for remote interaction with the marketplace, FXCM said.


“The inventions of the telegraph, ticker tape and telephone all contributed to the growth of marketplaces and exchanges in the US and Europe,” FXCM said. “When coupled with the computational power developed by the breakthroughs in information systems technology, the stage was set for the rapid evolution of computerized trading systems and electronic trading.”

The Kansas City Board of Trade was formed on the banks of the Missouri River in 1856, at the heart of one of the world’s most prolific wheat-growing areas. The market first started trading futures contracts in 1876.

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Bye-bye to outcry

The roots of electronic trading and digitization of the markets dates back to the 1960s and the use of streaming real-time digital stock quotes. Brokers could get specific market data on demand without having to wait for the ticker tape, FXCM said.

 
With the formation of the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ) was the “opening of Pandora’s Box for the trading industry,” FXCM said. It used cutting-edge information systems to create a strictly digital trading platform, one that other exchanges wanted to follow.


By the 1990s, personal computers were becoming more powerful and internet connectivity was improving and the push toward automated markets overtook the open outcry system. In 1992, futures contracts began trading electronically on the CME Globex platform. In 2002, MGEX launched cash-settled corn and soybean contracts on its electronic trading platform with wheat futures and options following in 2003.

 
Adoption of electronic trading moved swiftly. In 2004, electronic trading accounted for 61% of all CME volume; by 2015, 99% of futures contracts were traded electronically.
As electronic trading took off, open outcry died. MGEX closed its trading pits in 2008, KCBT ceased to exist in 2015 and NYMEX went completely electronic in 2016.

 
With no need for traders on the floor, the exchanges themselves started consolidating at a rapid pace. The CBOT and Chicago Mercantile Exchange merged to form CME in 2007, and a year later, CME acquired NYMEX. CME acquired the KCBT in 2012 and consolidated its trading floor with the Chicago operations in June 2013, just two years before KCBT closed for good.

 
CME, the lone holdout in open outcry trading, announced just this year that it will permanently close most of its physical trading pits, including those for grain trading. They closed March 2020 due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

 
With the closure, ag products like corn and soybeans will not have any human-to-human interaction in the pit.
“With the trading floor gone, you lose that atmosphere, that place where people gathered, where they not only made trades but traded information,” Ehmke said. “You kind of miss that. You also miss a lot of nuances in the pit. For instance, a trader could tell you if they see a bull market coming because they could hear it in the way people talked, if they were louder. You’re not seeing the human face anymore; you’re not hearing the rally in the market.

 
“You lose those other soft senses that a lot of people had made a career of. They could feel the market.”


But in open outcry, the volume of trading was constrained by human beings’ shouting at each other, Irwin said.
“So the total capacity to trade and the speed at which you could trade was constrained to a set of human beings in a physical place,” he said. “With electronic trading you’re now trading literally at the speed of light and the only capacity constraints are the size and speed of the servers that the futures exchanges use. That’s the big reason why trading was so quickly adopted and why pit traders have gone the way of buggy whips.


“Electronic trading isn’t perfect but it’s faster, with very few capacity constraints. It’s a much cheaper way of trading and overall it’s probably a fairer way of trading.”


Ehmke said electronic trading also has brought anonymity to the market, which is both an advantage and a disadvantage.

 
“There’s less to read in the marketplace because you don’t know who’s behind it,” he said. “In the pits, you could clearly see if it’s a commercial grain trading company.”


If a broker had a big deck of orders in his hands before the market opened, it was obvious he was going to be doing a lot of business that day. In response, people would start bidding up grain, he said.

 
“That was one of the limitations in open outcry, the anonymity was hard to come by,” Ehmke said. “It wasn’t hard to figure out who was behind a trade. That’s all gone away. That’s what people want; they want the anonymity and the ease of clicking and doing their own trade. Going through a broker was more cumbersome, more costly and more time consuming.”


Early on, electronic trading was like the Wild West, with smart traders figuring out ways to create an edge, said Angie Setzer, co-founder and partner in Consus, LLC, which provides individualized marketing and agronomic solutions to farmers and grain buyers. She started her career as a cash grain broker before becoming vice president of grain for Citizens Elevator.


“For a lot of the big companies, the lack of transparency was beneficial to them,” she said. “That’s what pushed electronic trading at such a fever pace. Early on I thought there’s no way this would replace us; the human element was too important. I didn’t imagine within eight years we’d go from 90% pit traded to 100% electronic. I never dreamed it would go that fast.”

To the future

After electronic trading, there was much talk about the possibility of blockchain, a decentralized digital ledger with records called blocks that is used to record transactions, could replace existing trading platforms. But that hasn’t happened yet, Ehmke said.


“Blockchain is a different type of technology that records information along the blockchain where you can see all the transactions of a commodity that’s being traded, like crypto currency,” he said. “If you can trade crypto currency, you can trade a bushel of corn. Not so much. The problem is how do you trace a bushel of corn, because it is getting commingled in the system. What bushel are you precisely tracking? There’s a limitation with using that technology with commodity trading.”


The purpose of blockchain is to make things more efficient; that simply isn’t needed in commodity trading, Ehmke and Setzer said.

 
“We already have something that is pretty easy,” Ehmke said. “It’s hard to make it simpler than what we’ve got now. I don’t see how blockchain has any chance of disrupting those services. We still need to have some sort of instrument to lock in future prices and I don’t know that blockchain is the tool to do that.”


But, Setzer said, blockchain might have a role in food safety and production.

 
“I’m not sure it will have a big influence when it comes to trading and turning bushels into cash,” she said. “As far as making sure we know what chemical has been applied or what seed has been planted, I definitely see a role for that, and I see it stepping up in the next 10 years, especially for growers looking for a premium.”


A bigger disruptor to the way commodities are bought and sold will be the changing role of the grain elevator, Setzer said. With so much information available, and the ability to trade without a broker, farmers may choose to bypass the elevator and do their own marketing and selling.

 
Many farmers are already maximizing what they get from the land, so the next opportunity to enhance value is to run their farms like a business, Setzer said.

 
“Nowadays farmers can be connected to a network of people they’d not be able to work with otherwise and it’s opened the door for farmers to trade like an elevator,” Setzer said. “I’ve seen more of this education and more of this discovery that there’s value in being able to control the bushel beyond the harvest. Some farmers know more about market structure fundamentals than even some experienced merchandisers. That’s going to continue to happen, especially as the next generation takes over the farm.


“That’s changed a huge part of the elevator industry and will continue to change the elevator industry going forward. Country elevators will always have a role but the ones that remain will provide flexibility and alternative resources.”


The number of cooperatives is declining, the amount of on-farm grain storage continues to increase, and the size of farms continues to increase, Ehmke said.

 
“We’re going to see more and more companies contracting directly with growers because they have the acreage and the storage, and they can segregate,” he said. “There’s going to be pressure on the grain cooperatives and merchandisers to innovate around that.”


The continued push toward consolidation is a definite market disruptor, Ehmke said, that will have some impact on grain trading companies and agribusinesses in general.
“If there’s going to be any disruptors, I think perhaps there might be some type of technology that could expedite the process of bringing the farmer and consumer closer together,” he said. “What does that look like? I don’t know. We’re going to innovate those technologies to make it easier to capture that value up the value chain.


“When you’re talking about the realm of trading platforms, you never know what it will look like. You saw blockchain come but it didn’t end up being the disruptor yet that people thought it would be. So you always have to have an open mind in terms of trading commodities.”


Recently, multiple new companies have formed to provide electronic direct connections between farmers and end users, making it easier for farmers to market their own products and incorporating blockchain for transparency.
Dubai Multi Commodities Centre (DMCC) and CropData Technology launched in 2020 the Agriota E-Marketplace, a blockchain-based e-marketplace that acts as an agricultural commodity trading and sourcing platform. Through the platform, bulk buyers from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are connected directly to farmers in India.

 
The marketplace has a range of services for contract, bid and money management, entity management, accounting, billing, reconciliation, analytics, fraud, risk and regulatory compliance management. Initially, it is handling cereals, pulses, oilseeds, fruits, vegetables, spices and condiments.
Farmers can connect directly to customers like food processing companies, traders and wholesalers. This cuts back on the number of intermediaries in a transaction, making the supply chain and traceability more efficient. The contract trading system will be powered by blockchain.
“This type of aggregation has the potential to empower local communities, deliver better quality farm-to-shelf products and expand the UAE’s long-term food security,” the DMCC said.

 
In October 2018, the world’s top agribusinesses announced plans to work together on an industry-wide initiative to modernize global trade operations. Archer Daniels Midland Co., Bunge, Cargill, COFCO, Louis Dreyfus and Viterra formed Covantis, a global agri post-trade platform for the execution of bulk shipments.

 
“In the history of the industry there has never been an initiative like this,” said Sorin Albeanu, head of commercial, Covantis. “This being achieved shows the industry agrees on the change that needs to happen and the challenges that need to be tackled.”


Existing post-trade execution processes are highly inefficient and there is hidden risk in how manual the processes are when it comes to exchanging contractual notices, passing through critical vessel information and identifying all the parties involved in buying and selling cargo.

 
Document workflow includes double data entry, slow communication and many last-minute changes, Albeanu said. In addition, documents are traded in a paper format and are transferred between many buyers and sellers, leading to delays, penalties and costs for having to issue letters of indemnity.

 
The Covantis platform, launched this February, covering soybeans and corn shipped and chartered out of Brazil, solves many of these issues. Soybean meal was added in August and there are plans for Covantis to expand into the United States and Canada in the first quarter of 2022. Argentina and the Black Sea region are also not far back on the list. Additional commodities such as wheat, sorghum, barley, oils and more will be added.


So far, 20 agriculture groups have signed up and more than 80 different legal entities active across the world were set up on the platform.

 
“Initially we focused on onboarding companies that act as shippers, FOB traders and charterers, allowing them to speed up the exchange of contractual notices, messages and documents,” Albeanu said. “With new functionalities being delivered, we have started to onboard CFR buyers, therefore covering the supply chain from port to port.”


The use of blockchain enables secure, real-time exchange of data, while increasing efficiency, reducing risk and costs.
“The platform is geared around creating visibility of long FOB and CFR strings of buyers and sellers that trade with each other the same cargo, the exchange of standardized contractual notices, messages and other vessel-related information, and improving the documents exchange workflow,” he said.

 
Through these capabilities Covantis is looking to improve efficiency and reduce errors, speed up communication and documents presentation, payments and therefore decreasing working capital and the risk for penalties. 


Additionally, by digitizing the post-trade execution processes Covantis creates an audit trail for the actions and data exchanged between parties, a single source of truth in case of disputes and enhanced security for how data is exchanged, therefore reducing the risk of forgery.  

 

Many times new technology meets with resistance, which slows its acceptance. Albeanu said Covantis has the backing of its shareholders not only in terms of investment but also in terms of data exchange and platform usage.


“Considering this support and the global agri firms that have already joined the platform, we are confident that we will achieve our objectives in terms of adoption. Even if we are live for only 6 months we have already seen over 60% of the Brazil flows, executed by charterers, being captured in the Covantis platform”” he said. “The time for change to happen is now.”

© 2005 VisionsofAmerica.com/Joe Sohm - stock.adobe.com

Timeline of commodity exchanges

April 3, 1848 —The Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) is founded as a cash market for grain. Forward or “to-arrive” contracts begin trading at the CBOT almost immediately.


1856 —The Kansas City Board of Trade is established by local Kansas City merchants as a means of trading grain.


1856 — Broker-assisted buying and selling of exchange-based securities was possible with the telegraph, invented in 1832. 


1867 — The first “stock ticker” was put into action in New York City at the NYSE, transmitting up-to-the-minute stock quotes originating at the NYSE nationwide. 


1876 — Futures trading begins at the Kansas City Board of Trade.


1877 — The CBOT begins publishing futures prices on a regular basis. Future CBOT documents considered this to be the beginning of “true” futures trading.


1881 — The Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce establishes an exchange, which in 1947 became the Minneapolis Grain Exchange.


1882 — The New York Butter, Cheese and Egg Exchange name is changed to NYMEX. 


Sept. 15, 1920 — The Federal Trade Commission releases the first of seven volumes of its Report on the Grain Trade. 


1920 — Nearly 88,000 telephones were in service in the Wall Street district. 


Sept. 21, 1922 — The Grain Futures Act, predecessor to the Commodity Exchange Act, is enacted. 


June 15, 1936 — The Commodity Exchange Act is enacted, replacing the Grain Futures Act.


1947 — The Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce is renamed the Minneapolis Grain Exchange.


1960s — Computer-based market data services began to take the place of traditional ticker-tape quotation services.


1969 — Building on digital exchange-based streaming quote technology, a company named Instinet introduced the first fully automated system for the trade of US securities.


1971 — Fully automated over-the-counter (OTC) trading became a reality with the formation of the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ).


1973 — Grain and soybean futures prices reach record highs. This is blamed in part on excessive speculation and there are allegations of manipulation.


Oct. 23-24, 1974 — Congress passes the Commodity Futures Trading Commission Act of 1974, and it is signed by President Gerald Ford. The bill creates the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC or Commission).


1992 — Futures contracts began trading electronically on the CME Globex platform, beginning the transition from pit-based floor.


Dec. 21, 2000 — President Bill Clinton signs into law the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which, among other things, reauthorizes the Commission for five years, overhauls the Commodity Exchange Act to create a flexible structure for the regulation of futures and options trading, clarifies Commission jurisdiction over certain retail foreign currency transactions, and repeals the 18-year-old ban on the trading of single stock futures.  


Feb. 15, 2002 — MGEX launched cash-settled corn and soybean contracts on the MGEX’s electronic trading platform. 


May 9, 2003 — MGEX launched financially settled hard winter wheat futures and options on the electronic trading platform.


2006 — NYMEX and CME begin transitioning toward electronic trading.


July 12, 2007 — The Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade announce the completion of their merger forming the world’s largest futures exchange, the CME Group.


2008 — CME Group acquires NYMEX’s holdings when NYMEX went public and was listed on the NYSE. 


Dec. 19, 2008 — MGEX closes its trading pits. 

2012— CME completes acquisition of KCBT.


July 2, 2015 — After the trading floor was consolidated with the Chicago operations in June 2013, the KCBT ceased operation in Chicago.


2016 — Under the CME Group umbrella, NYMEX goes completely electronic.


2021— CME Group announced that it will permanently close most of its physical trading pits, including those for grain trading. 

Posted on

Dawn of complexity

By John Unrein

September/October 2021

Dawn of
complexity

For two decades, the age of specialization has dominated the retail scene.

bake

Barry Callebaut/Manresa Bread/John Unrein

The year was 2005 when the world understood how dignified the American baking industry had emerged. For the second time in three occasions, the US team had triumphed in the world’s most prestigious event for craft bakers, winning the Coupe du Monde de la Boulangerie in Paris. Today, the three US team members – William Leaman in artistic design, Jeffrey Yankellow in baguette & specialty breads, and Jory Downer in viennoiserie – are among the most prominent bakery experts in the country.

 

At the 2019 International Baking Industry Exposition (IBIE), Downer shared pleasant memories when he demonstrated an award-winning pastry that he and The Bread Bakers Guild of America Team USA produced. “We did a dulce de leche crémeux that we cast in a Flexipan and popped out and put in the center of the pastry. We added slices of fresh mango, papaya, and red currents for color.”

 

Viennoiserie now ranks among the most recognized categories of French pastry, thanks to its flagship baked good, the croissant, according to the Escoffier School of Culinary Arts. The word “viennoiserie” – French for “things from Vienna” – describes a whole category of pastry that includes croissants, pain au raisins and brioche.

 

Bennison’s Bakery has been a Chicago North Shore institution since 1938, earning a reputation as a popular full-line bakery that specializes in European-style pastries, cookies and custom-decorated cakes. In 1975, Jory Downer followed in his father’s footsteps to join the bakery after learning the craft from his father, Guy, and attending culinary school and classes to improve his skill, eventually achieving the position of Certified Master Baker.

 

Like many retail bakeries, Bennison’s evolved with changing times. Similarly, Randy George started Red Hen Baking Company in September 1999 on Route 100 in Duxbury, Vermont. George had been baking bread for several years, both in his home state of Maine as well as in Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington. When Randy and his (future) wife Eliza Cain decided to move back to Liza’s home turf in the Mad River Valley of Vermont, they did so with the intention of opening a bakery.

 

“We don’t really gain a clear picture of the times we are living in until we have the perspective of distance,” George says today. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot ever since we crossed the two-decade mark in our business a couple of years ago. In many ways, it seems like just yesterday that we hung out our shingle in September of ‘99. But when I think about other periods in history, I’m reminded that a lot happens in 20 years. Take 1945 to 1965, for instance. We can all think of huge changes that happened in those two decades. When you think about it, we probably have seen similarly world-altering changes in the last 20 years.”


Consider these factual nuggets, the baker recalls about the year they first opened:

 

  • Bill Clinton was President.
  • No one knew who Osama Bin Laden was.
  • Cronuts were not even a twinkle in Dominique Ansel’s eye.
  • The Bread Baker’s Guild of America was six years old.
  • There was one option available to the bakery for flour milled from local wheat.
  • It was whole wheat flour milled by the farmer who grew it and there was no available data on it.
  •  

“If I was to guess, I’d say that the protein percentage was 9 at most,” George recalls. “My guess is that most years, this flour had a falling number of 200 or perhaps, less. In other words, as many bakers these days know, it wasn’t much use if it made up more than about 20% of a bread formula.


“Today, we all know what has transpired in the first four areas I listed,” he continues. “Many of us have also witnessed the transformation that has taken place across the country when it comes to bakers connecting with the source of our main ingredient. Twenty years ago, most bakers gave very little thought to where their flour came from. They would buy the type that worked for what they were making. Enthusiastic bakers might know the protein percentages of the flour they worked with, but many didn’t even think about that… and almost no one thought about things like ash content, wheat types and varieties, or where the wheat was grown.”


Today, from field to hearth and everywhere in between, people have thrown themselves into the work of educating themselves about grain growing, harvesting, and milling. It’s not entirely unusual these days to find bakers discussing such esoteric topics as the differences between Red Fife and Benatka wheat or how they dressed their millstones and adjusted the screens on their bolter to get a really silky high extraction flour, George points out.


“In the early 2000s, I recall being so excited when we bought flour from a large organic mill that listed the name and location of the farmer (usually in Nebraska or Kansas) on each load of flour. We supplemented that flour by buying a small amount of that aforementioned whole wheat flour. That was about as good as it got back then. Today, we buy all but a tiny fraction of our grain and flour from three farmers. All of that grain is grown within 150 miles of the bakery. We stone mill several hundred pounds of whole wheat, rye and corn every week on our locally made mill.”


If you told George in 2001 that this would be the bakery’s reality in 2021, he never would have believed it. And the story of Red Hen is not entirely unusual. The list of university-based researchers doing groundbreaking work on growing, processing and baking with local grain is long and covers all regions of the country.

 
“We have Steve Jones’ Bread Lab in Washington State,” George says. “In Vermont, it’s Heather Darby and the Northern Grain Growers Association, but that’s only the beginning. These days, it seems that every corner of the U.S. has a team of agronomists and bakers working to advance the production of top-quality grain that is well-suited to that particular area. In each of these areas, there is a list of bakeries putting this new knowledge to use by creating great bread that is an expression of the new agricultural economy that continues to develop in response to the enthusiasm for local grain.”

Left: Michelle Kwan at Keefer Court Bakery & Cafe is expanding the family business. Right: Christina Tosi has launched virtual pop-ups at Milk Bar.
Craig Ponsford of Ponsford’s Place says the lack of fiber in the average American’s diet is “mind boggling.”

Advent of technology

Likewise, in the all-important cake sector, similar advances have taken place over the past two decades, particularly in the adoption of new technology and design.


“The most significant single change that has happened to the industry in the last 20 years is the advent of technology, particularly the tremendous development of the Internet and social media,” points out Mark Seaman, a Certified Master Sugar Artist and Culinary Applications Chef for Barry Callebaut. He has owned two successful businesses in the Chicago area: an exclusive wedding cake boutique, and a separate retail bakery. 


When Seaman first started his wedding cake business in the early 2000s, the only real way to showcase your work was through wedding magazines. Running an ad was an expensive ordeal, he recalls, and there was no way to really know how many people you were reaching. 


“Today you can share as many visuals of your work as you like and know instantly which ones are most popular among your followers,” he says.
Technology has afforded cake shops across the country an amazing ability to connect with consumers in engaging ways. Freed’s Bakery in Las Vegas, a national leader in the wedding cake industry, has taken another step forward with its latest creation by announcing that it has developed the world’s first non-fungible token (NFT) wedding cake. It features a GIF of a handcrafted, digitized spinning wedding cake. The NFT is a token that can be used to represent ownership of a unique item.


Freed’s NFT was made available through auction in September. The bidding started at 0.1 of the cryptocurrency Ethereum, equal to $370.06. More NFT cake auctions are underway, including a rainbow cake and a pink pour sunset cake. They can be viewed at the OpenSea website.
Home delivery is another important option for the cake shop.


“We offer local delivery across the Vegas Valley, and pricing is based on the zip code for the delivery address. We ask for a three-hour window in which someone will be able to accept the cake,” according to Freed’s.

Lack of fiber

“Quality of life is the No. 1 priority, and our bread is one of the most amazing things ever to eat,” says Craig Ponsford, head baker and owner at Ponsford’s Place in San Rafael, California. The challenge for him is dealing with what he calls “the good, the bad, and the ugly” of current affairs in America. There is a huge population that is “very undereducated” about food.


“It still boils down to the same thing. The lack of fiber in our diets is mind boggling,” he says. “I’m very frustrated – more than any time in history. What’s happening now is 100 times worse than what happened when the Atkins diet was popular years ago.”


A decade ago, Ponsford proved to be a pioneer in using 100% whole grains in everything he made. While this practice is gaining popularity, it is but a small fraction of overall bread consumption in America. Ponsford strongly believes this needs to change.


“The message is, ‘eat your whole grains,’ but there is a disconnect,” the experienced bread baker says. “People aren’t understanding, and many still feel the need to buy bread with a tablespoon of sugar in it.”


Mike Zakowski, owner of The Bejkr in Sonoma, California, points out that grain quality can vary a lot from season to season, even plot to plot, “as all soils are different and have different needs for replacing nutrients into the soil. For example, if it’s a hard red wheat that is weak or has a low protein that won’t develop into good bread structure, maybe it can be used for sprouting, crackers, dog biscuits and possibly countless other uses.”


Speaking at the 2017 International Bread Symposium at Johnson & Wales University in Charlotte, North Carolina, Chad Robertson of the acclaimed Tartine Bakery in San Francisco said he’s learned plenty of valuable lessons since working with local and ancient grains for more than a decade.


“I want to get back to using lots of fresh milled stuff. There’s no other way to get that flavor,” Robertson said. “But I have learned that for me to mill everything myself is too much. So why not work with fresh millers nearby?”

John Unrein

Specialization takes hold

Once the Cronut was born at New York City’s Dominique Ansel Bakery on May 10, 2013, Cronut fans spanned the world from Berlin to Singapore, making it the most virally talked about dessert item of the year. Time magazine proclaimed the Cronut as one of the 25 best innovations of 2013.


“I never thought it was going to go that big,” recalls Ansel, who won the James Beard Award for Outstanding Pastry Chef in 2014. “The second day we made 100 Cronuts and we sold out in one hour.”


While the Cronut is perhaps Ansel’s most famous item, the DKA remains a popular seller. Short for “Dominique’s Kouign Amann,” it is best described as a “caramelized croissant” with a crispy sugary crust and tender flaky layers within.


What followed was a trend toward hybrid baked goods becoming the “in” thing. There are hybrid cars, hybrid breeds of dogs, and now hybrid pastries. A hybrid pastry combines one type of pastry or baked item with another. Starbucks once introduced a muffin-donut hybrid called the “duffin” in the United Kingdom. What followed from other bakeries across the country was a list of pastry-mashup names like Kreegals, Cruise-nuts and Krönums.

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Asian flavor

As America’s population has grown, so has its diversity. At Keefer Court Bakery & Café in Minneapolis, Sunny and Paulina Kwan started the first Chinese bakery in Minnesota, serving traditional Cantonese food, pastries, and fortune cookies since 1983. The Kwan family remains at their original location off Cedar Ave and Riverside Ave near the University of Minnesota West Bank.


In 2017, they sold their fortune cookie division, and after 35 years of hard work, Sunny and Paulina passed the torch to their daughter, Michelle, to carry on the family legacy. Michelle is excited to continue serving the Twin Cities with their newest line of Chinese and Hong Kong style menu items, including a new line of vegan options.


Kabocha congee is one example. First, they boil down large pieces of Kobocha squash, water-soaked shiitake mushrooms and rice for several hours, until the mixture becomes more like a soup. They top it off with kimchi.


“It prompted me to realize we are becoming known in the vegan community,” Kwan says of the endeavor. “My family is from Hong Kong, but I was born here. This bakery was my playground growing up.”

Online selling

For Janice Jucker, who runs noted Houston bakery Three Brothers Bakery with her husband Bobby Jucker, their shop has experienced so much more competition in the past two decades, including Walmart and Amazon. She points out their P&L chart of accounts is three times as big, since the bakery opened in 1949.


What else has changed? Social media, websites, blogging, search-engine SEO, data security, etc. “Online selling and offering different ways of shopping through third party sellers,” Jucker exclaims. “Climate change – because we have been hit by so many disasters (Houston, of late, suffers hurricane flooding nearly every year).”


You can’t just come to work, work hard and be successful, she emphasizes. “The business is so much more than that – how to keep the team happy and feeling wanted, government policies, commodity prices and more.”

Publican Quality Bread

Baking obsession

Founded by James Beard award-winning pastry chef Christina Tosi, Milk Bar first opened its doors in NYC’s East Village, and soon developed a loyal fanbase. Recently profiled on Netflix’s docu-series Chef’s Table, Tosi is known for combining her formal culinary training and her informal obsession with home baking, grocery store staples and classic American sweets, with menu items like the Compost Cookie®, layer cakes with unfrosted sides, Cereal Milk™ Soft Serve, Milk Bar Pie and more.


“We are not just saying, “Mix to light and fluffy.’ We are writing measurable, comprehensible steps — using precise instructions,” Tosi explains. “We spend a lot of time in our R&D kitchens in New York and Los Angeles. If we are making a big batch, we’ll test a dough ball from the top of the mixer and one from the bottom. These types of steps help connect the team with what makes this cookie so special.”


This year, Milk Bar has been bringing its treats to customers in new cities this summer through “virtual” pop-ups. The bakery is showing up in various major American cities through popular delivery platforms including Postmates, Uber Eats, Caviar, DoorDash and Grubhub. Among the items featured on these platforms for a limited time are a three-tiered birthday cake, Milk Bar Pie, a S’mores cookie cake and strawberry shortcake truffles. These pop-ups have already taken place in various cities across the country, including Chicago, Atlanta, Minneapolis and Dallas.

 
In northern California, Avery Ruzicka mills 90% of the—primarily local—grains in house; sources high-quality artisanal ingredients; employs time-honored baking techniques; and uses natural fermentation processes to create a rotating selection of sourdough loaves and sweet and savory pastries.

 
Ruzicka’s new “Bake with Manresa Bread” mixes are available for nationwide shipping and local pick-up, either individually or as a bundle—making them a fun and interactive way to enjoy the bakery’s favorites at home. Each mix features house-milled flours. Featured mixes are sold individually or as a bundle and include House Milled Whole Grain Einkorn Waffle Mix, House Milled Rye Mocha Brownie Mix, and House Milled Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookie Mix.

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Setting the Table

By Monica Watrous

August 17, 2021

Setting the
table

The enduring legacies of George Hormel, W.K. Kellogg and Milton Hershey

Food Business News

W.K. Kellogg, Milton S. Hershey and George A. Hormel were among the visionary entrepreneurs who more than a century ago paved the way for how the world eats today.


The founding fathers of the packaged food industry demonstrated ingenuity and resilience in the face of failed businesses and factory fires, worker strikes and world wars, a global pandemic and the Great Depression.


Today, the companies that bear their names honor the founders’ legacies while elevating a new generation of food entrepreneurs to ensure the next century of success.

A cereal entrepreneur

By the late 1800s, former broom salesman William Keith Kellogg had joined his older brother, renowned physician Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, to run a health spa in Battle Creek, Mich. The younger Kellogg handled bookkeeping and other responsibilities at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, where patients ate a vegetarian diet that included an early form of unsweetened granola based on wheat and oats. (A guest there named Charles W. Post was accused of swiping the recipe that would inspire the launch of Grape Nuts cereal).


An experiment with the grain mash led to the accidental invention of flaked cereal. The discovery would lead to a bitter brother rivalry, including a legal dispute over naming rights, but more significantly, it would revolutionize the traditionally meat-based morning meal.


Soon after W.K. Kellogg founded his boxed cereal business in 1906, dozens of competitors flocked to Battle Creek, eager to capitalize on this new convenient and wholesome breakfast concept. Mr. Kellogg distinguished his offering by adding his signature to each package of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. A savvy businessman, Mr. Kellogg continually improved the product line, packaging technology and marketing strategy to meet changing consumer tastes. He later established the W.K. Kellogg Foundation to promote the health and well-being of children.
“W.K. Kellogg was an early conservationist, a leading philanthropist and the original well-being visionary,” said Kris Bahner, spokesperson for Kellogg Co. “His values live on today through our K Values — they shape our Kellogg culture and guide the way we run our business. They help to define what makes our company and our people special and how we all play a unique and critical part of the ongoing success of our business.”


Today, Kellogg Co. invests in emerging businesses with innovative product concepts through its venture fund, eighteen94 capital. Kellogg also is a founding sponsor of The Hatchery, a food business incubator in Chicago. The company supports creativity at all levels of the organization through innovation competitions, including one held recently for its interns.


“That innovative and entrepreneurial spirit that shaped an entire industry lives on today — we like to say innovation breathes fire into our vision and purpose as a company, and we continue to innovate as we head into the next 115 years,” Ms. Bahner said.

W.K. Kellogg

A chocolate empire

Prior to popularizing milk chocolate in America, Milton S. Hershey encountered a series of setbacks. His first two businesses had failed. Perfecting the formulation for his signature product followed months of trial and error. Driven by persistence and vision, Mr. Hershey developed a new process for creating chocolate, tapping local dairy farms for fresh milk, and ultimately transforming an elite treat into an everyday staple for the masses.


“We steward Mr. Hershey’s legacy of innovation and entrepreneurship by seeking to add more beloved snacking brands to our portfolio,” said Ryan O’Hara, director of strategy at The Hershey Co. “We continually scan the market for high-growth, high-potential brands like Skinny Pop, and more recently Lily’s, to extend our moments of goodness with new consumers and new occasions.


“We also invest in startup companies like Blue Stripe and Quinn that are uniquely innovating in snacking, and related capabilities like Bonumose, that are developing breakthrough technologies to meet current and future consumer needs.”


Mr. Hershey’s achievements extend beyond the company and surrounding community he built in his name. He was a celebrated philanthropist who notably coined the term “commerce with compassion,” viewing business as a force for good. In 1909, he and his wife, Catherine, founded what would become the Milton Hershey School to provide education and opportunity for orphaned boys. He later transferred the majority of his wealth to the Milton Hershey School Trust fund. In 1935, he established the M.S. Hershey Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to cultural and educational enrichment.


“Purpose-driven companies are now becoming more commonplace, but Milton Hershey started it all over 100 years ago when it wasn’t even popular or on anyone’s radar,” said Brian Lange, a Hershey plant manager.

Milton Hershey

A protein pioneer

“Originate, don’t imitate,” a key commandment of George A. Hormel’s business, guides innovation efforts today. The challenge is imprinted on a wall of the Hormel Foods Corp. headquarters in Austin, Minn.


With previous meatpacking experience, Mr. Hormel established Geo. A. Hormel & Co. in 1891, setting up pork processing operations inside an abandoned creamery. He also opened the Hormel Provision Market to sell his products. Mr. Hormel, and later his son Jay C. Hormel, are credited for pioneering numerous innovations in food production and packaging that catapulted the company’s growth in the years that followed. The younger Hormel oversaw the introduction of several products, including Dinty Moore beef stew, Hormel chili and Spam luncheon meat.


“George Hormel’s eagerness to find and incorporate new approaches to the business continues today,” said a spokesperson for Hormel Foods Corp. “The company’s innovation and corporate development teams scour the globe for game-changing developments at all levels: from research labs and startup pitch competitions to major food shows. When acquiring companies, Hormel takes great care to respect each new team’s culture and retain what made it great in the first place. Applegate, Justin’s, Columbus Meats and Planters are some prime examples of the success of this approach.”


In 1941, George and Jay Hormel established The Hormel Foundation, which ranks fourth in annual charitable giving among Minnesota’s largest community and public foundations. The following year saw the opening of the Hormel Institute, today a cancer research facility.


The actions of the father and son demonstrate a commitment to employees and veterans that remains ongoing within the enterprise. In 1938, Jay Hormel started a profit-sharing program, which last year distributed $17.9 million to eligible hourly and salaried employees. Beginning with the Spanish-American War of 1898, George Hormel vowed to re-employ all returning soldiers who worked at the company previously. Hormel Foods continues its support of military personnel through employee assistance programs and initiatives such as Operation Gratitude and Tables of Honor.


“Since the beginning, we’ve believed that social responsibility is more than giving away a percentage of our profits at the end of the year,” said James P. Snee, chief executive officer of Hormel Foods Corp. “While we are committed to many worthy causes, including cancer research and fighting childhood hunger, it is our core business — efficiently producing delicious food for the world’s growing population — of which we are most proud.”

Left: Jay C. Hormel Right: George A. Hormel

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100 Years

100 Years

Our story is your story. During tough times and those filled with prosperity, the retail baking industry has advanced through the determination of family businesses dedicated to knowledge of their craft and solid work ethic.

The Rise of Fresh

The Rise of Fresh

Where the grocery perimeter’s been, where it is now, and where it’s headed.

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Leading the Pack

By Charlotte Atchley

August 2021

Leading the
Pack

Whether increasing production line capacity or reducing plastic waste, sealing in freshness remains at the heart of packaging.

Baking & Snack

Bundy Baking Solutions

Packaging does so much for a bakery or snack product. First and foremost, it protects it, and ideally prolongs shelf life so that consumers can enjoy a baked good or snack at its peak quality. But packaging also can communicate to consumers about a brand and provide new ways for them to enjoy the product, whether for the convenience of a more mobile lifestyle or variety packs for family members with different tastes.

 
“We ask packaging to do a lot of things: promote the product, protect, transport, provide information of the product,” said Tom Egan, vice president, industry services, PMMI. “You want to know what’s in the product, whether that’s calories or potential allergens. Packaging provides all of that.”

 
Many packaging innovations of the past 100 years have arrived to meet those needs, whether that’s increasing throughput on production lines, extending shelf life or delivering the information consumers want. And packaging innovation continues to meet the food industry’s needs for the future.

While marketing may have changed, the original bag-in-box packaging for cereal hasn’t changed much since Kellogg Company first used it in the early 20th Century. Kellogg Company

A need for speed

The first patent for a pre-fabricated carton was issued in 1879 to Robert Gair, and it would be used by Nabisco in 1896 to package the company’s crackers. In 1906, Kellogg Company, Battle Creek, Mich., used the cardboard box to store its Toasted Corn Flakes, implementing a packaging design that hasn’t really changed in more than 100 years. In some ways, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it.


Just because the carton worked so well doesn’t mean companies stopped innovating. On the contrary, the packaging industry has seen leaps in innovation, particularly automation, that has enabled exponential growth for the baking and snack industry.
“You need automation in order to mass produce not only the product but also the package,” Mr. Egan said. “So automation, the machines themselves even before we get to electronic automation, is what really is driving the growth of baking and snack.”


Form/fill/seal technology empowered bakers and snack manufacturers to package product at an accelerated rate. The vertical FFS machine was patented by Walter Zwoyer in 1936. Mr. Zwoyer worked at a candy factory and was looking for a way to quickly package individual candies when he developed the machine.


“When you can package products at a higher rate on VFFS, all the rest of the equipment has to run at a faster rate,” Mr. Egan explained. “Allowing multiple lanes to be formed at once improves throughput and expands the market opportunities.”
Robotics promise the next leap when it comes to increasing production and streamlining the packaging department. While the first packaging robots were deployed in the 1960s and ’70s, they have taken some time to catch on. Schubert’s Robby the Robot demonstration at a trade show in the 1970s showed the industry the potential of robotics in the packaging department.


“What Schubert did in the confectionery market was demonstrate the ability to do a higher speed of a combination pack whether it’s the solid chocolate or combination of solid and filled chocolate,” Mr. Egan explained. “That allowed the industry to expand and increase the number of SKUs it was producing.”


By automating the packaging department, bakers and snack manufacturers were able to make their production floors more flexible and offer more products, packaged in different formats.

Keeping it fresh

And then there’s sliced bread and the bread bag itself. The original bread slicer dates back to 1928 and was developed by Frederick Rohwedder and perfected by Gustav Papendick, who added the capability to wrap the bread in wax paper and package it in cardboard trays. In 1930, Wonder brought sliced bread to the entire nation, which continues to be a colloquial measure of innovation … “the greatest thing since sliced bread.”


The convenience of sliced bread was a hit, but keeping sliced bread from going stale too quickly was a challenge and required packaging that preserved its softness. From wax paper to cellophane to polyethylene, materials have evolved to keep bread fresh even sliced. The 1960s brought plastic technology and bread bagging technology to automatically package bread in its now universal packaging format, a polyethylene bag with a twist tie or clip.


“If it weren’t for certain plastic bags, we wouldn’t have been able to have a 7-day shelf life for bread instead of a 2-day shelf life,” said Brian Wagner, co-founder and principal at PTIS, LLC.


According to Tom Dunn, managing director, Flexpacknology, efficient bread bag packaging required a coordinated effort of several needs. The industry had to develop the side-weld bag making process for printed polyethylene film and implement a wicketing method to stack bags for transport to the bakery. For the actual bagging process, machines had to remove bags from those wickets, open them with a puff of air and push a loaf of bread inside before applying a closure. All of this came to fruition in the 1960s when Alvin Formo developed an automatic poly bagging machine that was then tweaked after acquiring the patent rights to a bread bagging machine developed by Roy Willard and Bill Noyes.


While FFS machines and bread baggers may have met the needs of preserving shelf life and speeding up production, the stand-up pouch, introduced in the ’60s, also brought new form and the ability for resealability to snack and bakery products. The stand-up pouch opened up the possibility of packaging beyond the carton.


“The pouch allows flexibility to not only display the product in a whole different way at endcaps and points of purchase, but it also allows the convenience to carry it,” Mr. Egan explained. “When you consume half the contents, the pouch collapses and takes up less space. It can be squeezed and fit into spaces a rigid container can’t.”


Modified atmosphere packaging (MAP) offers the potential to be the next frontier when it comes to keeping food fresher for longer. This technology replaces the oxygen inside a bag, like a bread bag, with a gas mixture that will stave off staling. It originated in the UK and Denmark in the 1970s and continues to gain application across the food industry. In the 1990s, Mr. Wagner worked with the United States military to use MAP to extend the shelf life of bread and cake products delivered to soldiers in the field.


“We developed a MAP extended shelf life technology that really required just removing the oxygen so mold couldn’t grow and doing some formulation work so staling couldn’t happen,” he said. “In the early ’90s, we developed a three-year shelf life bread and cake item, which is super relevant for soldiers who hadn’t been able to have bread and cake in the field until that time.”

All about the consumer

While packaging may have started out as an answer to staling and molding food, ultimately, Mr. Wagner said, it’s about serving a consumer need, whether improving soldier morale or delivering a satisfying treat.
“The consumer is No. 1 because if it doesn’t taste good, and it doesn’t deliver on brand promise, the consumer isn’t going to buy it,” Mr. Wagner said. “Packaging plays a huge role in the consumer mind in the bakery world.”
Packaging communicates a lot to the consumer. Whether it’s the brand design and colors on the packaging or the nutrition and ingredients listed on the packaging, consumers turn to packaging to tell them a lot about the product they are looking to purchase. While eye-catching graphics, a brand story and nutritional information are obvious elements to communicate with packaging, even packaging integrity is critical to tell consumers something about the safety and freshness about what is inside.
“We had an issue with frozen desserts where the cartons were getting crushed at retail and the perception that gave consumers about the brand and how that would impact consumer trust,” Mr. Wagner said.
A secured, sturdy package communicates to consumers that the product inside is protected and fresh. A resealable and tamper-evident closure states that they can trust what’s inside is safe to eat and will stay fresh longer. Mr. Dunn pointed out that longer supply chains, bakery and snack manufacturer consolidation and retail labor costs have also all spurred packaging innovation.
“Sturdy plastic trays overwrapped with barrier films replaced paper ‘dump bags’ and paperboard cartons for baked cookies as shock and vibration forces during transportation increased,” he explained.
Universal Product Codes (UPCs) in 1973 standardized product identification and tracking and leveled the playing field for products in front of the consumer.
“The printed UPC on snack and bakery packages gave powerful customer loyalty opportunities to merchandisers at the expense of consumer goods brand equity,” Mr. Dunn explained. “As a result, store brands now compete effectively with national brands.”

Packaging machines, like this cartoner from 1922, enabled bakers and snack manufacturers to reach new speeds and throughput numbers. PMMI
Wonder introduced sliced bread in 1930 nationwide, kicking off the industrial baking industry and the need for effective packaging. Bundy Baking Solutions

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Future is now: Incremental advances improve highly efficient, labor-light flour mills

Future is now: Incremental advances improve highly efficient, labor-light flour mills

On the occasion of its 100th year chronicling the evolution of milling in the United States and reporting on the commodity markets that feed the world, Milling & Baking News spoke with milling experts about the technological leaps, bounds and baby steps that led to the modern flour mill.

Catalysts for change

Catalysts for change

The pressures of regulation and consumer demand have led to significant advances in food science for the baking industry.

Packaging of the future

Packaging has come a long way from the tried-and-true carton and the wax paper bread wrapper. Machines and materials have pushed the limits of automated production and extended shelf life of products and made food more convenient for people to eat and store.
Extended shelf life, increased throughput, greater flexibility and added convenience will always be at the forefront of packaging needs, but today’s challenges have evolved to other consumers.
Sustainability is at the forefront with plastic being public enemy No. 1 in some cases. As populations grow, resources dwindle and consumers become more concerned with waste. More consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies than ever are making commitments to seek out packaging made with recycled or other materials that are less harmful to the environment. The Consumer Brands Association (CBA) reports that the 25 largest CPG companies have all made commitments to minimize packaging or reuse materials, and 80% of those companies have set goals of using fully recyclable packaging by 2030.
“There is going to be a billion more people on this planet, and we won’t have the resources,” Mr. Wagner said. “That’s been driving innovation around materials. How do we use less plastic, different plastics or design packaging so it can be reused?”
Before the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, sustainability was a top concern for consumers, especially when it came to packaging. According to a consumer study by CBA, this is still true, although there is some more nuance. Eighty-two percent of Americans said they were concerned with the environment in 2020, down from 90% the year before, and 80% said they are concerned about single-use plastics compared with 87% in 2019. Consumers seem to understand that plastic has its place — especially in keeping food safe in a pandemic. CBA’s study found that 50% of Americans said recycling became even more important during the pandemic to handle the increase in single-use plastic and packaging, while 45% said it was equally as important as before.
Packaging made from recyclable materials, lighter gauge materials, bioplastics derived from plants and chemical recycling technologies are all on the table for sustainability, and new technology is constantly being developed to pursue those goals.
While the pandemic may have brought nuance to the sustainable packaging need, it jumpstarted e-commerce and how omnichannel will influence the packaging of the future. This growing channel has changed the supply chain but also increased consumer expectations of convenience and product quality.
“You’re buying something online, and you want it to arrive exactly the same way that resulted from the traditional packaging and supply chain process, but the number of touchpoints and handling could change significantly,” Mr. Egan explained. “The number of times the package is handled goes up, and the package still needs to protect the product.”
Resolving that issue is driving much of packaging innovation happening today.
“There are so many companies trying to figure out how to extend the shelf life of any product to meet the needs of e-commerce,” Mr. Wagner said. “Like shipping a hamburger to your house and packaging it so it will still be fresh. Any way you do it, even insulated packaging for frozen goods, it’s going to be expensive, but there is a lot of innovation going on because it’s a huge market need.”
The digitalization of manufacturing will also influence future innovations of packaging. Invisible codes on packaging will be able to deliver more information to consumers as well as send data back to manufacturers. Production lines are becoming more integrated, delivering production data to operators in real time.
“Digital transformation is causing us to rethink the way we do everything,” Mr. Wagner said. “You can monitor packaging uptime and downtime and make immediate changes instead of waiting a week when you’re reviewing your data. All of these possibilities are getting less expensive, and we will be able to use them in so many new ways that will drive value and take waste out of the system.”
Some innovations over the past 100 years have been industry-changing events, but Mr. Egan pointed out that packaging is always improving even if in small ways.
“There are constant incremental improvements being made all the time,” he said. “The industry is always looking for ways we can do better. We still need packaging that will protect, promote and improve the point of use at the consumer level.”
Change, incremental or revolutionary, for packaging is on the horizon.

As consumers become increasingly concerned with packaging and food waste, the need for sustainable packaging will drive future innovations. Rawpixel Ltd.
Stand-up pouches were developed in the 1960s and offer flexible packaging for bakery and snack products. Campbell Snacks
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A Century of Frozen Food Progress

By Jeff Gelski

July 20, 2021

A Century of
Frozen Food Progress

Canadian fishermen, microwaves and cauliflower move the category forward

Food Business News

Frozen food has appealed to changing consumer desires for more than a century, from quality and convenience to health and gluten-free concerns. Breakthrough ideas have come from unexpected sources, including fishermen in Canada, turkeys in railroad cars and children with celiac disease.

Freezing fish inspiration

The quality of frozen food was lacking before Clarence Birdseye headed north. Freezing food early in the 20th century required large blocks of ice. The slow process led to ice crystals embedded in the food, resulting in poor taste and quality, said Dan Skinner, communications manager at Chicago-based Conagra Brands, Inc., which now owns the Birds Eye brand.


Mr. Birdseye’s link to frozen food began when he was working with the US Department of Interior in Labrador, an area in northeast Canada, in the 1920s. When the Inuit fished there, Mr. Birdseye noticed how they used ice, wind and temperature to instantly freeze fish.


Upon returning to the United States, he worked on replicating this flash-freezing process. His invention consisted of two metal belts chilled to negative 45° Fahrenheit. Food, including fish, meat and vegetables, could be pressed between the two belts and frozen quickly, Mr. Skinner said.


Mr. Birdseye received a patent for his flash-freezing process in 1927 and then sold it to Goldman Sachs, where he stayed on as a consultant, Mr. Skinner said. The first Birds Eye products entered the market in 1930.


“There was a little initial skepticism, but once people realized this was a quality product, it quickly took off,” Mr. Skinner said.


General Foods, Dean Foods and Pinnacle Foods all owned the Birds Eye brand at different times throughout the years until Conagra Brands acquired Pinnacle Foods in 2019.

Clarence Birdseye received a patent for his flash-freezing process in 1927.

Too many turkeys

Decades after the debut of the Birds Eye brand, Swanson Foods encountered a problem: What to do with 260 tons of frozen turkeys sitting in railroad cars.


“In 1953 Swanson had made a bad read on the number of Thanksgiving turkeys they were going to need,” Mr. Skinner said.


The miscalculation led to Swanson creating its TV dinner. Who should receive credit for it remains the subject of debate. Some point to Gerry Thomas, a salesman who suggested Swanson combine the excess turkey with cornbread dressing and vegetables on the assembly line, creating a frozen dinner, Mr. Skinner said. Brothers Gilbert and Clarke Swanson, leaders of the company, led the TV dinner project as well. Betty Cronin, a bacteriologist working for Swanson Foods, figured out how much time would be needed to cook three different food items.


“It was much more of a team project than any one person,” Mr. Skinner said.


Thanks to the TV dinner, Americans could eat while watching “I Love Lucy.” Swanson sold 10 million turkey dinners in 1954.

The microwave marriage

The history of the Stouffer’s brand, a rival to Swanson, dates to 1922 when the Stouffer family opened a restaurant in Cleveland, according to Nestle SA, Vevey, Switzerland, which now owns the brand. The family went on to open a chain of restaurants. Freezing items allowed the company to sell them to consumers as take-home items. By 1954 Stouffer’s restaurants were serving over 14 million meals, and the company was creating frozen entrees, too.


Stouffer’s gained an edge over Swanson in one area: speed. Litton Industries, Inc., which offered brand-name products like Litton microwave ovens, acquired Stouffer Foods Corp. in 1967, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. The microwave oven became a way to heat frozen foods more quickly.


Nestle acquired the Stouffer’s brand in 1973. Lean Cuisine entrees, each containing fewer than 300 calories, were introduced in 1981.

Cauliflower crust

Earlier this century Gail Becker knew how to heat and eat frozen food, but that was about it.


“If it’s possible to know less than nothing, then that is what I knew,” she said.
Since her two sons with celiac disease could not eat gluten, she began experimenting in her kitchen, making gluten-free pizza with cauliflower crust. The trial-and-error efforts eventually led to a satisfying product, and the creation of Caulipower, a frozen pizza brand.


Early on, Ms. Becker read about the frozen food industry and spoke to as many people as she could, learning new words and what certain acronyms meant.


“And I hired a lot of people much smarter than me to teach me about the business, and I was like a sponge quite frankly,” she said. “I learned something new every day. I’m still learning something new every day.”


Once the Caulipower frozen pizza caught on, it brought new consumers into the frozen foods aisle.


“I think that’s one of the reasons why retailers are very much drawn to the brand,” Ms. Becker said.

Caulipower founder Gail Becker popularized cauliflower crust for frozen pizzas.

Recent resurgence

Ms. Becker sold the first Caulipower pizza in February 2017. That same month Packaged Facts, Rockville, Md., released a report stating overall US sales in the frozen food category were flat. Packaged Facts projected US sales would fall to $21 billion in 2021 from $22 billion in 2016 in the four frozen foods categories of frozen dinners/entrees, frozen pizzas, frozen side dishes and frozen appetizers/snacks. Product innovation, including bold flavors, varieties inspired by world cuisines and products with healthier nutritional profiles, were strengthening the market, according to the report.


Sales picked up after the report came out. Then they soared during COVID-19 as more consumers ate at home.


Packaged Facts, in a June 2020 report, revealed US frozen pizza sales registered a compound annual growth rate of 2.6% from 2014-19, rising to $5.63 billion in 2019 from $4.94 billion in 2014. Packaged Facts projected sales to hit $6.38 billion in 2020, drop to $5.97 billion in 2021 and eventually reach $6.49 billion in 2024 thanks to a forecast 2.9% CAGR from 2019-24.


US frozen food sales grew 23% in the first half of 2020 when compared to the first half of 2019, according to Acosta, Inc., Jacksonville, Fla., an integrated sales and marketing provider in the consumer packaged goods industry. In the second half of 2020, the sales growth was 18%.


“As COVID-19 set in, consumers began eating at home more out of necessity,” said Colin Stewart, executive vice president, business intelligence at Acosta. “To adapt, they searched for new ways to cook creatively, and for many, frozen foods were the answer. Total frozen sales grew 20.6% from 2019 to 2020, outpacing the growth of total store and total edibles.


“Frozen foods have come a long way, and recent innovation has driven the appeal from mere convenience at the expense of taste and quality to something for every palate and dietary concern. The category’s expanded offerings give consumers a quick and cost-friendly way to enjoy diverse dishes in the safety of their own homes.”


Innovation has come in the historic Birds Eye brand, which now offers vegetable-based pasta and zucchini-based noodles, Mr. Skinner said.


“We’ve got a rice cauliflower offering that is really popular,” he said. “We have fried cauliflower offerings that are very popular in bars and restaurants right now.”


Nestle SA in 2021 is exploring ways to expand in plant-based items. Company sales in plant-based meat analogs are over $200 million, said Ulf Mark Schneider, chief executive officer, in a Feb. 18 earnings call.


“But when you look at the wider opportunity, when you look at where we use these ingredients to then make more attractive downstream offerings like frozen pizza with plant-based toppings or frozen meals or other prepared dishes, then it’s a much bigger opportunity,” he said.


Ms. Becker has kept the frozen food innovation coming at Caulipower. Besides pizza, the company in the frozen food category has expanded into cauliflower chicken tenders, pasta and rice.


What idea will next advance the frozen food industry? Ms. Becker said it could be home delivery.


“The cost of frozen shipping to end consumers is still very high,” she said. “I think that is something that is ripe for innovation.

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A Century of Fluid Milk Innovation

By Donna Berry

July 6, 2021

A Century of
Fluid Milk Innovation

Food Business News

©bq-studio.ru – STOCK.ADOBE.COM

Sosland Publishing Company’s coverage of the food industry started out focusing on the grain, flour milling and baking industries for the first 50 years after its founding in 1922. During that same era, the meat-processing industry began a government-mandated transition away from being dominated by a handful of companies that developed an integrated infrastructure that made it almost impossible for outside cattle producers, feedlot operators, livestock transporters or processors to survive unless they were part of what was then, an insurmountable machine. There has always been an important link between the grain industries and commercial livestock production as feed quality and availability determines price, which is passed on to meat processors and the quality, availability and price they could demand for products on the market. A century ago, and still today, the constant has been the meat and poultry processing system’s reliance on grain-based feed to finish and sustain the herds and flocks needed to produce food for a dynamic, growing and migrating population. What has changed and continues evolving are the names in the game today versus 100 years ago.


Few if any of the pioneering companies, brands or descendants of the industry’s legendary leaders of 100 years ago are relevant or involved in today’s industry, evidence of the constant evolution and change that has made meat and poultry processing’s history a long and winding road dotted with plenty of peaks and valleys. Volatility has been a constant challenge for the meat processing industry as it has been for all segments of the food supply chain. Factors ranging from weather to labor issues to regulatory compliance to economic instability to international relations can have profound impacts on the degree of business success or failure any segment might experience.


Since Sosland’s founding, the company has expanded its portfolio of publications and websites to include a wider swath of food and beverage industries, including commercial and retail baking, global grain, meat and poultry, pet food, dairy and the supermarket perimeter. Looking closer at some of the names and companies that were prominent in the meat industry from a century ago sheds light on how the pieces complete the puzzle that is today’s industry.

Donna Berry
editor@sosland.com
The author is a contributing editor for Food Business News and a principal in the firm Dairy and Food Communications, Inc. Her website address is www.berryondairy.com.

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Setting the Table

Setting the Table

The enduring legacies of George Hormel, W.K. Kellogg and Milton Hershey

A Century of Frozen Food Progress

A Century of Frozen Food Progress

Canadian fishermen, microwaves and cauliflower move the category forward.

A Century of Fluid Milk Innovation

A Century of Fluid Milk Innovation

The US fluid milk industry has been one of the most highly regulated food and beverage sectors since rules were put in place at both the state and federal levels in the mid-1930s.

The US fluid milk industry has been one of the most highly regulated food and beverage sectors since rules were put in place at both the state and federal levels in the mid-1930s. It is no wonder why product innovation had been almost nonexistent until the late 1990s, when the low-fat and fat-free milk standards were eliminated from the Code of Federal Regulations.


“This meant that instead of different requirements to meet the standard of identity for ‘low-fat milk,’ the product would have to meet a combination of the regulatory definition for ‘low fat’ enacted after the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990 and the standard of identity for ‘milk,’” said Michelle Matto, consultant to the International Dairy Foods Association, Washington. “The compliance date was Jan. 1, 1998.”


This allowed for technologies to improve or enhance milk. It also opened the doors to functional ingredient addition.


When it comes to innovation with “the white stuff,” many of the advancements have gone unnoticed by consumers. Until the 21st century, the only visible progress had been in packaging.


“There have been many significant changes in the dairy industry in the past 100 years from the processing techniques, improvement of shelf life, manufacturing capabilities, packaging machines and containers,” said Ed Mullins, chief executive officer, Prairie Farms Dairy Inc., Edwardsville, Ill. “Distribution from home delivery to large mass retailers is the biggest retail change to note. Larger farms and consolidation of dairy processors has also occurred over the last century.”


In the early 1900s, dairy farmers were limited to what they could do by hand and with minimal equipment. They produced milk for their own immediate consumption and may have supplied neighbors and local businesses. It was delivered by cans and glass milk bottles, with the latter patented in 1878.


By this time farmers were aware of how thermal processing of milk deactivated spoilage microorganisms and enzymes. The glass bottles could be filled with pasteurized milk and sealed, an early example of extending shelf life. This allowed for daily home deliveries from the milk man.


The buzz during the Great Depression was that milk would soon be sold in paper containers, a concept consumers could not understand. As economies improved and houses were fitted with electricity, refrigerators were installed. This allowed for the storage of milk for longer periods, making larger containers attractive.


The first paper milk carton was introduced in 1933. It included a wax coating to make it waterproof. It came in varied sizes, with the paper gallon a very short-lived one, as the plastic “stapled” handle proved to be challenging to hold and pour.


“One of the biggest changes over the last 100 years is how milk gets distributed and into the homes of families,” said Rachel Kyllo, senior vice president, marketing and innovation, Dairy Farmers of America (DFA)-Dairy Brands, Kansas City, Kan. “In many ways, it’s come full circle, as the iconic milk man used to deliver right to the consumers’ doorstep. Then, we evolved into consumers picking up milk at their local grocery stores and even big box retailers. Now today, consumers are still picking up milk at the store, but we’re also back to making digital deliveries right to the consumers’ home.”


Lynne Bohan, spokesperson for HP Hood LLC, Lynnfield, Mass., said, “Some of the most significant changes in the milk category over the past century include the manufacturing and packaging technologies to improve quality and extend shelf life.”


One such example is the LightBlock Bottle Hood introduced in 1997. Research shows that when milk is exposed to light, it may cause off flavors to develop by oxidation. Hood’s LightBlock Bottle uses technology that prevents more than 97% of light from penetrating the bottle, which protects the milk from light, helping to maintain its fresh taste.


Since 1999, the company has been using ultra-filtration technology to remove 20% of the water from raw milk to produce its Simply Smart line of 1% and fat-free milks. The reduced water content improves mouthfeel by providing the perception of a higher-fat product. At the same time, this process also concentrates the protein and calcium contents.


“With Simply Smart Milk, you can taste a difference, all the taste without all the fat,” Ms. Bohan said.


Hood also produces the Lactaid brand of lactose-free milk. Lactase enzyme is added to the milk to break down the lactose, making it easier to digest. The availability and variety of lactose-free milks in the United States has been growing in the past 10 years as a way to keep lactose-sensitive and lactose-intolerant consumers drinking dairy rather than switching to non-dairy alternatives.


Prairie Farms, for example, was one of the first companies to offer lactose-free chocolate milk back in 2018. Lactose free is also a key attribute of fairlife milk, which debuted in 2014. The Chicago-based business, now owned by The Coca-Cola Co., Atlanta, developed an ultrafiltration process that removes the lactose and much of the sugar in milk, while concentrating the protein and calcium. It was the first multi-serve milk product to stray from the paper carton or typical plastic jug. The shrink sleeved and capped blow-molded recyclable bottle produced needed disruption in the multi-serve milk category, which had been experiencing steady declines since the 1970s.


“While milk is still purchased by more than 90% of households, there are so many beverage choices available to consumers today,” Ms. Kyllo said. “So, as an industry, we must continue to look for opportunities to drive product and packaging innovation that appeals to the wants and needs of today’s consumers.”


With a growing number of consumers seeking more options in their beverage choices, especially when it comes to milk, Ms. Kyllo and her DFA team decided to go where no other beverage manufacturer had gone yet. In late 2019, the cooperative developed Dairy Plus Milk Blends, a refrigerated beverage combining lactose-free dairy milk with almonds or oats. There are sweetened and unsweetened options, as well as a chocolate variety.


Another shakeup in the milk case came in 1997, when Dean Foods Co. answered the question that went unanswered for too long: How do you fit a milk carton into a car’s cup holder?


The company’s Milk Chug became the standard for single-serve fluid milk products. It was portable, resealable and round. The company also used an intermediate shelf-life processing technology to extend the typical 14- to 21-day shelf life of a traditional milk product to a 30- to 40-day shelf life while maintaining fresh milk flavor. The longer shelf life enabled the Milk Chug to be distributed into new markets and distribution channels, including national retail accounts.

Fluid milk product innovation did not start accelerating until the late 1990s, when some federal standards were changed. stonyfield, fairlife, turkey hill and lactaid

Milk Chug brought overall category growth to markets where it was available, contrasting stagnant sales in markets where the product was not. The brand grew as distribution expanded, and was promising in the early years, with 1999 sales showing a 56% increase, from $64.1 million in 1998 to more than $100 million.

Unfortunately, the Milk Chug, later losing that name and going with the Dairy Pure brand, was not enough to keep the business healthy, and Dean Foods filed for bankruptcy in November 2019, dissolving by March 2020. At the time, Dean Foods was the United States’ largest milk producer. The bankruptcy served as a wakeup call to other milk processors to innovate and improve their marketing of milk.


The COVID-19 pandemic further got milk processors thinking. For the first time in nearly 40 years, retail milk sales were up, and not just by a percent or two.


“In 2020, the dairy department grew from being a $54 billion business to generating more than $61 billion, a $7 billion increase,” said Abrielle Backhaus, research coordinator, International Dairy Deli Bakery Association, Madison, Wis. “Milk and natural cheese remained the two sales powerhouses in December and all year.”


Milk added $1.4 billion in sales in 2020 versus the previous year, according to IRI, Chicago. As the country opens and eating out becomes more prevalent, retail milk sales have started to fall.


The dairy industry has started campaigning that milk may be the original superfood, as it delivers 13 nutrients, more than most beverages can claim without fortification. That may not be enough to slow the decline in sales, but it does provide a canvas for the addition of extra nutrition — think probiotics, plant sterols and prebiotic fiber — as well as creativity in flavor formulations, convenience packaging and even specialty claims, such as grass fed, organic and A2 proteins. The next 100 years likely will include many more transformations of the white stuff, with cellular cultured forms of animal-free dairy protein on the horizon.

Fluid milk added $1.4 billion in sales in 2020 over the previous year, according to IRI. ©yingyaipumi - STOCK.ADOBE.COM
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Playin’ it Safe

By Bob Sims

July 2021

Playin' it
Safe

Legislation, science and culture have all been variables in the evolution of food and worker safety.

Meat+Poultry

Library of Congress Public Domain

In 1905, an event outside the meat processing industry forever changed its trajectory. That year marked the first publication of Upton Sinclair’s now classic novel, “The Jungle.” The work of fiction depicted the unsavory conditions of the meat packing industry in the United States. Sinclair spent seven weeks working in the packing houses of Chicago to gather experiences for the book. Those experiences gave the author the details necessary to write a book that brought change to an entire industry through legislation, specifically the passing of the Meat Inspection Act of 1906.


This event and others marked monumental shifts throughout the evolution of food safety in the meat packing industry. They set successive changes in motion and pushed food safety and consumer well-being to the top of the priority list for meat processors in the United States.

Early Acts

President Theodore Roosevelt read “The Jungle” and sent labor commissioner Charles P. Neill and social worker James Bronson Reynolds to Chicago, and through their Neill-Reynolds Report, the two confirmed the details of Sinclair’s descriptions of the meat packing houses in his book. Congress then passed the legislation and President Roosevelt signed the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 into law. While “The Jungle” highlighted worker safety, it essentially created the impetus for food safety, as well.


The Meat Inspection Act of 1906 reformed the meat packing industry in the United States and set standards for sanitation and safe food for human consumption throughout the industry. It established a statute that prohibited the sale of misbranded and adulterated livestock, and the food products derived from that livestock, and ensured slaughter and processing occurred under sanitary conditions. Also, the law mandated the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspect all cattle, swine, sheep, goats and horses processed for human consumption before and after slaughter.


“As far as legislation goes, the meat act has not been opened since 1906, so we’re working off the same legislation,” said Casey Gallimore, director of regulatory and scientific affairs at the North American Meat Institute (NAMI). “The only change that’s happened since then is poultry got added in with The Poultry Products Inspection Act [1957] and then you have the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act. But the actual ‘nuts and bolts’ that we work off of at the Meat Institute is the same act from 1906.”


The Humane Methods of Slaughter Act in 1958 addressed the suffering of animals during slaughter and not food safety, but The Poultry Products Inspection Act of 1957 applied the principles of The Meat Inspection Act of 1906 to poultry and poultry products, requiring federal inspection and prohibiting misbranding and adulteration. Another act did pass in 1967, filling in a few other gaps in the 1906 act.


The Wholesome Meat Act of 1967 added consumer protection to the 1906 act by addressing conditions not covered in the original law. Animals slaughtered for intrastate commerce did not fall under the federal inspection regulations of the 1906 law and were the responsibility of the state. Limited state funds opened the door for abuses and inadequate food safety. The 1906 law also left out imported products and rendering.


The new act in 1967 amended the 1906 act adding the regulation of transporters, renderers and cold-storage warehouses to the USDA’s authority, as well as requiring much stricter requirements on imported meat products. In addition, the new act extended the USDA’s jurisdiction over slaughter and processing for intrastate commerce and only allowed uninspected meat to go to the owner of a slaughtered animal.


As regulations, laws, government oversight and an understanding of the need to push food safety forward in light of significant events evolved, so too did the processes of ensuring food safety regarding all the periphery of the meat business.

Today, food safety and worker safety are both rooted in science and risk assessment.

Continued Evolution

As with all industry today, technology and the automation and machines that result from it continue to change manufacturing at a rapid pace. This change includes the meat and poultry industry, but meat and poultry processing maintains some uniqueness relative to most other manufacturing industries. People still provide much of the labor in processing.


“If you think about vehicle manufacturing or even a lot of food manufacturing, they can be done primarily with machines where employees are highlighting the machines,” Gallimore said. “Wherein our industry the predominant part of processing happens from employees, and machines highlight employees and help employees. It’s very different.”


Meat and poultry processing necessitates human labor due to the impossibility of every cow, hog, chicken, etc., to match an exact specification, size and weight needed for machines to adapt to the unavoidable variances. So many unique variables create an intricacy requiring human abilities. The reliance on, and need for, human skill and labor to carry out processing tasks has shaped the way the industry inspects for food safety, but that is changing.


“For a long time, the industry’s only ways of inspecting to see if things were good were just looking at it, smelling it and touching it,” Gallimore said. “Now, the environmental and product microbial sampling programs at these facilities are intense. They have all kinds of different things they’re testing for on very intricate schedules between areas of the plant or different types of products, different organisms that they’re looking at whether it’s pathogens or indicator organisms, so inspections are more based on what you can’t see and what really is causing illness.”


As inspection evolved and became better and more comprehensive due to science and academia, so did food safety. Industry began to realize when all companies provided safer food, the industry benefited. Because of that premise, over time a shift occurred and the processing industry began sharing information on food safety. Suppliers to the industry began to share information with not only their processor customers, but also with each other. Food safety became noncompetitive.


“At the end of the day, all the customer sees is that there is ground beef being recalled, and then they have a fear of ground beef,” Gallimore said. “So, we realized many years ago that we weren’t served by anyone doing better than anyone else on food safety because all of our products are looked at as very much the same thing.”
KatieRose McCullough, also a director of regulatory and scientific affairs at NAMI, related the same sentiment to worker safety in meat and poultry processing.


“[The meat and poultry] industry did the same thing with worker safety as well,” McCullough said. “It said, ‘this isn’t a competitive issue.’ In the spirit that all our employees are valuable because human life is valuable, and how do we best protect our workers in a noncompetitive space? We did a very, very similar thing when it came to worker safety as well.”


A direct relationship exists between food safety and worker safety. While USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), established in 1977 as the Food Safety and Quality Service (FSQS) and reorganized and renamed in 1981, oversees meat and poultry food safety and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), founded in 1971 after the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 monitors worker safety, one always affects the other in the meat processing industry.


As the people pointing out the things employees might or might not be doing to ensure safety, personnel often share close relationships in meat packing plants.


“The other thing is that they’re both rooted in science and risk assessment,” Gallimore said. “So, you make decisions in food safety and worker safety based on data and risk assessment. That again is another reason why those two types of people in plants tend to have really close working relationships and really play off each other well.”

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Future is now: Incremental advances improve highly efficient, labor-light flour mills

Future is now: Incremental advances improve highly efficient, labor-light flour mills

On the occasion of its 100th year chronicling the evolution of milling in the United States and reporting on the commodity markets that feed the world, Milling & Baking News spoke with milling experts about the technological leaps, bounds and baby steps that led to the modern flour mill.

Catalysts for change

Catalysts for change

The pressures of regulation and consumer demand have led to significant advances in food science for the baking industry.

Modern Perspective

Legislation, science and academia eventually came together after an event in 1993 took food safety to a next level. An E. coli outbreak at San Diego-based Jack in the Box restaurants sickened more than 700, hospitalized 144 and killed four. This event prompted legislation mandating Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) plans in 1996. Russell Cross, professor of Animal Science at Texas A&M University, and an original advocate for mandating HACCP in meat processing, said the regulations also applied to all state-inspected facilities as well as federally inspected facilities.


“And really when the United States mandated HACCP in 1996, they were effectively mandating HACCP for a good part of the world,” he added. “Because anything that’s imported into this country has to have a meat inspection system that’s equal to the US system. That impacted a lot of the countries around the world.”


In addition to all the legislation generated from “The Jungle” to government mandated HACCP plans, another and more slowly moving event shaped the evolution of food safety and continues to further it.


According to Frank Yiannas, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) deputy commissioner for food policy and response, while legislators responded to events that placed food safety issues in the public eye, and the food industry worked to make food safer, the food production and foodservice communities began to recognize the advancement of food safety needed more than just rules, testing, inspections and training. There needed to be a shift in the way people think.


“It requires a better understanding of human behavior and concepts of organizational culture,” Yiannas said. “In fact, you can have the best rules, policies and procedures written on paper, but if they’re not put into practice by people, they’re useless. But, widespread realization of that reality has been a long time coming.”


He added, “Increased interest in food safety culture has coincided with advances over the past 50 years in behavioral and social science research that have produced valuable insights into people’s thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors. So, you see, advances in understanding the technology of keeping foods safe and understanding the behaviors needed to keep foods safe have been advancing on parallel tracks.”


Company leaders must define food safety as an intrinsic value of the company, a non-negotiable thread of the fabric sewn into organizational culture. It is not a priority, but instead a guiding principle to how those in the food industry conduct business.


“Food manufacturers need to recognize that a food safety culture is not a communication plan, a tagline or a slogan,” Yiannas said.


Everyone from the C-suite to managers on the processing floor must make sure expectations concerning food safety are clear and communicate those expectations, as well as ensure all the knowledge and skills are in place to produce safe food. Investments in the design, or renovation of facilities, tooling and equipment selection and replacement and having experts on staff all play crucial roles in the production of safe food.


“It also includes managing food safety metrics and utilizing positive and negative reinforcement,” Yiannas said. “And it involves having knowledge of and leveraging proven behavioral science principles in your journey to strengthen a culture of food safety. Creating a food safety culture involves leveraging both food science and behavioral science.

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The New Dawn of Hybrid Wheat

By L. Joshua Sosland

June 29, 2021

The New Dawn
of Hybrid Wheat

Milling & Baking News

Stephen Baenziger

It was just over a 100 years that the sun slowly began rising on a new technology that was destined to transform US agriculture. While it would take a few decades for crop hybridization to take hold, the innovation ultimately would transform crop plantings and play a pivotal role in the ascendance of corn as “king” of US agriculture.


For the last 40 years, this transformation has relegated wheat further and further from its former central position in the farm economy. Thanks to the introduction of hybrid varieties, corn yields in the United States have risen steadily faster than wheat, helping corn encroach on land considered the heart of wheat country. Kansas, long described as the breadbasket of the United States, has harvested more corn than wheat, generally much more, nearly every year since 2003. Over the last three years, Kansas corn production has averaged 736 million bus, versus wheat production at 302 million. In 1950, by comparison, Kansas produced 178 million bus of wheat and 52 million bus of corn.


Now, wheat breeders see a new potential revolution on the horizon. Thanks to a humanitarian imperative, the need to feed a rapidly growing global population; a technological breakthrough — the sequencing of the wheat genome; and more cost-effective economic prospects, the potential for transformative wheat hybrid programs appears more promising than ever.


Plantings of hybrid wheat in the United States and much of the world are negligible currently, but change is looming on the horizon. In May, Syngenta AG announced plans to introduce four hybrid wheats in Europe under the X-Terra brand. A month later, BASF said its hybrid wheat would be sold under the Ideltis brand and would be available by mid-decade in Europe and the United States. Initial work has been focused on Germany, but the company in 2019 hosted the Technical Committee of the North American Millers’ Association, highlighting activities around the company’s hybrid wheat program and providing a tour of their North Carolina facilities.

 

Jan Gielen, a scientific officer with Zurich, Switzerland-based Syngenta Group, said the potential for hybrid wheat is considerable.

“Improving yields and crop safety by means of hybridization represent a huge challenge but has become within reach due to recent advances in breeding technologies, including the access to genomic tools and resources,” he said.
The company hopes the wheat will be shown to have strong baking qualities, suitable for the French baguette, he added.


“We submitted hybrids this year and need to wait for authorization — two years of official trialing to qualify for the recommended list for France,” Mr. Gielen, who is based in Toulouse, said.


Higher yield is a crucial benefit necessary for hybrid seeds to become successful in the marketplace, but the measure oversimplifies grower considerations,
Mr. Gielen said. With more extreme weather conditions emerging because of climate change, the benefits of hybrids will become more apparent.


“Yield is one thing,” he said. “Hybrids also are more robust. In harsh conditions, hybrids on average perform better than conventional varieties. With a smaller portfolio, you will be able to cover more environments.”


Mr. Gielen said Syngenta has been working to develop hybrid wheat seed since 2010, based on the expectation hybrids would yield more, would be more robust and more resilient to both environmental stresses and diseases. While the initial introduction is slated for Europe, Mr. Gielen said the US market would be ideal, longer term.
“In the United States, yields in general are not as high as in Europe,” he said. “In suboptimal growing areas I think hybrids will really differentiate from conventional. At the same time, you need growers who are comfortable with high tech. In Europe, growers are more receptive to applying fungicides and fertilizers to reach maximum yields.”


While first introduced in the 1910s, hybrid technology for corn did not gain momentum until the 1940s. The cumulative impact over the last eight decades has been extraordinary. Corn yields forecast by the US Department of Agriculture for the 2021 crop were 180 bus per acre, up 475% from 1940 yields of 76. Over this same period, wheat yields increased by 231%. More recently, since 1980, corn yields are up 97%, versus 51% for wheat. Over the last 40 years, corn acreage has increased 8% while wheat acreage has dropped 43%.


Why weren’t wheat hybrids developed and introduced alongside corn hybrids in the 1940s? Stephen Baenziger, PhD, professor emeritus of Agronomy at University of Nebraska — Lincoln, identified two principal reasons.


The first is that wheat already was benefiting from successful breeding programs in the 1930s and 1940s, and the need to increase yields through hybridization was not seen as compelling. By contrast, for the 30 years before 1940, corn yields were barely moving, Dr. Baenziger said.


Indeed, from the mid-1860s until a peak in 1915, wheat yields jumped 52%. Peak corn yields, reached in 1906, were up about 30%.


“Productivity in corn was basically flat, as opposed to wheat, which had continuous improvements because we had a very good dedicated breeding sector working on that,” he said.


Private companies tried introducing wheat hybrids from time to time over the past century, but because cross-bred wheat varieties were seeing modest yield increases, the hybrids that were introduced failed to adequately separate themselves from conventional cultivars, Dr. Baenziger said.


“The public program and private programs continued to improve their competitors, the cultivars,” he said. “And the hybrids never really could distance themselves from what was coming from behind.”


Dr. Baenziger cited a second key reason corn hybridization programs were more successful than wheat.


“Hybrids were relatively easy to make in corn,” he said. “It’s much more difficult in wheat.”


Produced by crossing two inbred lines, hybrid grain requires the sterilization of the male components of one of the two parents, to prevent the plant from self fertilizing. In the case of corn, sterilization is relatively easy. Once it appears in the field the tassel (male) is removed from the plant, and the ear (female) is fertilized by another plant. Multiple rows of detasseled female plants grow beside single or double rows of male plants, the pollen from which fertilize the female plants, which then generate the hybrid seed.

In the case of wheat, the male parts (stamen) are impossible to effectively and economically remove physically from the female plants.


There are other challenges, Dr. Baenziger said. Application of chemical hybridization agencies (CHA) has been used to sterilize the male parts of wheat plants, but this technique has a narrow window of application for pollination success. Corn produces more pollen than wheat, and wheat pollen does not survive as long.


Dr. Baenziger said many breeders and companies look at corn as the model system and are daunted. Attempts by several companies in the 1980s to develop hybrid wheat failed, in part because of a lack of cooperation with public breeding programs.
“Don’t forget it started 100 years ago,” he said. “A better example is hybrid canola, or hybrid rice. Much newer. In rice, for 30 years they worked and didn’t figure out a production system that was worthwhile. Finally, they figured out how to produce hybrids on a large scale. Hybrid wheat will take a sustained investment.”


He cited data showing that, in the most recent survey of the breeding sector, 900 breeders were working on corn, 870 private and 30 public.


“You have massive amounts of investment,” he said. “For wheat, the number was 120 breeders, half each public and private. If you have seven times the number of breeders, you would expect they would have higher productivity.”


Mr. Gielen said the use of chemical hybridization agents has helped breeders like Dr. Baenziger demonstrate the potential for hybrid wheat but cautioned that commercial success will rely on non-chemical solutions.


“The practice of hybridization by means CHA is not sustainable,” he said. “The CHA compounds are subject to strict regulations that limit the acreage on which they may be applied, and the sterilization procedure itself is very sensitive in terms of timing, environmental conditions, crop physiology, etcetera. For hybrid wheat to gain market share, an alternative hybridization system that can be deployed at large scale is essential.”


Companies like Syngenta are using non-chemical techniques in breeding programs to create male sterile plants. Called cytoplasmic male sterility (CMS), the technique breeds a desirable female parent by replacing its cytoplasm, a cell component essential for plant growth and reproduction, by an alternative cytoplasm that fails to support the development of anthers or pollen. This cytoplasm switch, conducted by a multigenerational breeding process, neuters the plant’s male parts (stamen or anthers) but leaves the parental line otherwise intact and ready to be pollinated by the second breed or male parental line. In crops like sunflower, sugarbeet, rapeseed but also barley and rye, similar CMS systems have successfully produced hybrid seed for many years.


In the case of wheat, the female (neutered) seeds are planted with male parents by Syngenta in a blend of about 95:5, the male plants assuring proper pollination of the female plants.

Jan Gielen

“The seed is then harvested together,” Mr. Gielen said. “Hybrid wheat therefore is not as uniform as corn since the hybrid seed will also contain a low percentage of the male plants using this technique.”


Other breeders use a technique similar to production of hybrid corn, in which three drill strips of female seed are planted for each strip of male.


The humanitarian case for investment in hybrid programs is a compelling one, Dr. Baenziger said. He spoke on the subject May 27 in a webinar sponsored by the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium. Toward the end of his presentation, Dr. Baenziger discussed the importance of hybrid wheat in the future, posing the question, “Why do we need to do this?”


“We know what the population is expected to grow to, and we also know that that population will not eat like the population we have today,” he said. “They are going to be more prosperous. They are going to eat more so we need to improve our grain yield by 1.4% to 1.7% annually. And currently in the Great Plains, the breadbasket of America we’re at 0.9%. So if you don’t have a plan to raise grain yield by 1.4% to 1.7% annually, you have a plan to fail. And failure cannot be an option.”


Looking beyond the United States, Dr. Baenziger cited data showing developing world wheat yields are rising 1% annually, and rice is rising at the same rate. Corn is averaging above 2%. Yields in the developed world are not rising for wheat, and corn yields are climbing about 1.5% a year.


“So they are in the ballpark,” Dr. Baenziger said.


Rather than being intimidated by the success of hybrid corn and giving up, the wheat community should look to rice for what may be possible.


“Hybrid rice, facing similar challenges, persevered and they continued,” he said. “They were told that it wouldn’t work. You couldn’t get it done. It’s a self-pollinating crop. You can’t make cross-pollinated crops, and that occurred right up until they figured out the system. The father of hybrid rice Yuan Longping died just May 22. Now there are 17 million-plus hectares of hybrid rice grown globally. Millions of people are fed because of that. What always bothered me as a public plant breeder is the question: Where could wheat be — because there is only 100,000 to 200,000 hectares for hybrid wheat — if someone had continued to work on hybrid wheat?”
While emphasizing considerable time and investment will be required if hybrid wheat is to gain a foothold in the United States and globally, Dr. Baenziger said the mapping of the wheat genome and learnings from this breakthrough spearheaded by researchers in Europe will make the identification of successful hybrid pairings far more efficient.


Toward that end, the University of Nebraska is collaborating with Texas A&M University in a hybrid initiative in which each university breeding program contributed 25 males and 50 females, equating to 150 lines in total.


“If you have 150 lines total you can make 11,175 hybrids,” he said. “I can’t make them, I can’t test them, but using the algorithms from our colleagues in Germany we can make 700 hybrids. That’s 25 males by 14 females and there are a different set of females for each one of the males by two locations. That’s to make sure we don’t have a weather catastrophe.”


Thanks to the genome mapping science, testing of 700 hybrids allows scientists to accurately predict the performance of the remaining 10,475 wheat lines, he said.
Two years of trials have generated promising results with numerous hybrids outperforming the most successful inbred checks.


“So heterosis (when a crossbred individual outperforms both parents, also known as hybrid vigor) can be found,” he said. “The key point is, you’re going to have to breed for it. Hybrid corn didn’t get to where it is today by a hundred years of random chance, it was very hard breeding for heterosis and that’s what we’re seeing here. “
Dr. Baenziger said it is impossible to predict whether the adoption of hybridization in wheat will reverse the erosion of wheat planted area in the United States. Ultimately, finding a way to keep cost of goods under control will determine whether hybrid wheat finally gains a foothold, but Dr. Baenziger is confident hybrid vigor will be achieved.


“There are really excellent algorithms to predict hybrid vigor,”
he said. “That’s only because of sequence information. Big data allowed it . Companies are coming back to hybrid wheat. They see opportunity and it is worth the investment to the benefit of the grower, end user, and consumer.

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The future of milling: art versus science

Sequencing the wheat genome as published in 2018 by the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium represented a “major step forward” in wheat genomics, said Pierre Devaux, PhD, director of research and innovation at Florimond Desprez, a seed company based in Cappelle-en-Pevele, France.


The sequencing has launched a process that will continue for many years to find molecular markers necessary to breed wheat in a way that leads to more desirable traits, including higher yield, greater disease resistance and enhanced milling and baking quality.


Dr. Devaux and other global experts in the field offered an upbeat assessment of the potential for what will result from studying wheat genetics, including revitalizing efforts to develop hybrid wheat (see related story above, beginning on Page 1). At the same time, the scientists said many wheat breeders initially were reluctant to utilize the tools made possible by the successful sequencing of the wheat genome. Such reluctance appears to be fading.


“When this sequence became available, it was very much used to locate various sequences that were currently used to develop new molecular markers in the vicinity of the sequences of interest, improve them, and design more friendly molecular markers that are more robust, reliable and less costly in their usage,” Dr. Devaux said.


Rudi Appels, PhD, an honorary professor at the University of Melbourne, said that in addition to setting the stage for projection of the molecular markers used to track traits in breeding programs, the work laid bare “the almost whimsical distribution of repetitive genes across the A, B and D genomes” of the hexaploid cereal plant (two copies of each of three genomes (A, B and D) or six sets of chromosomes).


“Research on the genome sequence has also shown gaps (missing sequences in the genome),” Dr. Appels said. “Just in May the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium published a major improvement in the assembly of each of the 21 chromosomes incorporating new technologies. The optical maps where DNA molecules are physically observed has been a major breakthrough in wheat.


Christopher Burt, cereal genotyping manager at RAGT Seeds in the United Kingdom, also highlighted progress achieved since the 2018 sequencing of the genome.

“The major advance subsequently has been the publication of more than 10 different varieties — the wheat PanGenome,” he said. “While the original genome was a huge advance, it was in a ‘lab rat’ wheat variety called Chinese spring, which is very different from modern wheat varieties. The more recent genome ‘assemblies’ provide us with much more relevant information for us to use in our breeding programs. There have also been major advances in how we, and everyone, can access the data, through publicly available web-based tools. These have helped people without specialist computer programming capabilities to utilize the information.”

Breeders increasingly are embracing the tools made possible by the sequencing of the wheat genome, Dr. Devaux said.

“In the early days, some breeders were doubtful about the use of new technologies, e.g. molecular markers, especially when their breeding programs were running very well,” he said. “But now all the wheat breeding community is convinced about the benefit of such technologies and has been using them routinely and at high levels.”

Dr. Appels was more blunt about reticence among veteran breeders and tipped his cap to Stephen Baenziger, professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, as an exception among this group.

“Adoption of the molecular tools and high throughput phenotyping in breeding has required commitment from visionary individuals such as Stephen Baenziger as well as the younger breeders coming through the education system,” Dr. Appels said. “In general the adoption by the older breeders has not been good because they (correctly) insisted on ‘show me’ the results. This ‘show me’ test is now being achieved particularly with the application of SNP chips for the rapid genotyping of individuals in a breeding program.”

Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are used to study small variations between whole genomes to identify traits, including disease susceptibility/resistance.

Mr. Burt said many breeders found data from wheat genome sequencing “quite removed” from their work in the field, adding that the wheat breeding community is using the new technology to some extent “even if they aren’t entirely aware of how they are using it.”

Tackling the threats posed by climate change is among the most important potential benefits that could emanate from the sequencing of the wheat genome, Dr. Devaux said.

“Agriculture is facing many challenges, including global warming, extremely changing weather conditions e.g., flooding, extreme drought, heat, increasing population over the world, ban of pesticides, organic agriculture and more,” he said. “This means that breeding programs have to adapt to these new situations, and as far as there are genes controlling the traits, the breeders can have a response to that. With better knowledge of the wheat genome and more recently of the wheat genomes (at least 15 have been sequenced so far), more areas of the genome that contribute to increase yield, quality… will be identified and combined to improve these traits. In addition, we have better information on what parents we have to cross to combine many genes of interest.”

Dr. Devaux said biotechnology may play a role in helping wheat adapt to changing needs, globally if not in the United States.

“We have created a GM wheat that is more resistant to drought and salinity for South America,” he said. “For this part of the world, this new trait enabled wheat to be adopted in areas where it is more difficult to grow.”

Because of the long timeline entailed in developing new wheat varieties, Mr. Burt cautioned that patience will be required.

“Most advances in wheat varieties that we have recently seen or will see in the next 18 months started from the research and breeding process long before the availability of the wheat genome,” he said. “Also, the wheat genome is just one component that helps the research and development that underpins wheat breeding.”

As an example, Mr. Burt cited the introduction by RAGT in the United Kingdom of a variety dubbed RGT Wolverine. The variety resists barley yellow dwarf virus, which is important because certain chemical solutions for the virus have been banned.
“The process of introducing this trait and the extensive backcrossing process started about 20 years before the release of the wheat genome,” he said.

“This is an important development as bans on neonicotinoid seed treatments have caused concern over the resurgence of viral diseases such as barley yellow dwarf virus that are spread through an insect vector,” he said. “The use of the wheat genome in our genetic marker design process helped us at RAGT to develop markers to a resistance to this virus so that we could introduce it efficiently into competitive wheat genetics. Although, to go back to my earlier comment, the process of introducing this trait and the extensive backcrossing process started about 20 years before the release of the wheat genome.”


Dr. Appels said yields, by necessity, long have been a priority for wheat breeders and growers. SNPs have helped efforts around yields to make considerable progress toward developing varieties best able to “deal with the constant challenge of biotic and abiotic stresses.”


In the past, breeders often spent a decade or longer working to achieve a major breakthrough on a single trait, Dr. Appels said. While many years will still be required to develop new varieties, the sequencing of the wheat genome and SNPs will allow breeders to focus on enhancing multiple traits simultaneously, including traits of interest to milling and baking, he said.

As an example, he discussed ways to boost milling yields.


“In the standard milling of grain, a larger grain is optimal and contributes to milling yield,” he said. “Variation for this trait has been mapped to the genome to define regions that can now be tracked using the SNP chip technology.


“This technology generates haplotype ‘fingerprints’ of significant regions for milling yields that can be documented at the same time as regions conferring environmental tolerance and disease resistance.”


He explained that in the past, multiple tests would be conducted on each sample for individual traits. He said the fingerprint technology replaces much more time consuming biochemical procedures that had been used to identify associations for favorable quality attributes.


“In flour, high molecular weight and low molecular weight glutenins and gliadins are the major proteins,” he said. “These three proteins make up what people commonly call gluten. For a whole generation, those proteins have been measured by chemical means. Now they can be measured by the fingerprint testing procedure. These are critical components of wheat flour quality.”


Dr. Appels said feedback from the milling and baking industries will be crucial for breeders to understand which varieties have the qualities that are most desirable. He believes the DNA fingerprinting technology will facilitate enhanced integration of the feedback from millers and bakers into the work of breeders.


He cautioned that many quality characteristics, including water absorption properties of flour, are not as well defined as the glutenin flour proteins. He said wheat genome sequencing will “provide a more rigorous methodology for ensuring that large batches of grain meet the stated specifications for milling and baking.”
What is imperative for the next several years, Dr. Appels said, is building out a database of fingerprints that offer quality keys to a comprehensive range of important wheat quality traits, such as water absorption and milling yields.