Food and drink advisory service Campden BRI is urging businesses to get involved with a new bread softness research project.

Starting from January 2018, the project will research ways to create and maintain bread softness by understanding and controlling the factors that influence texture.

The pre-competitive research will be steered by the ‘club’ of participating companies, and each member will be able to use the project findings for their own commercial benefit.

Areas to be studied will include:

  • Effects of ingredient, recipe and process variations on initial bread softness
  • Effects of storage conditions on softness, including ambient, chilling and freezing/thawing
  • Relationship between crumb and crust texture
  • Effects of bread bubble structure, anisotropy and distribution within slices and within loaves
  • Interaction with other product components such as sandwich fillings, packaging and moisture barriers.

Campden BRI said the project would be of interest to a variety of companies in the baking industry, including bread manufacturers, suppliers of bakery ingredients and retailers of sandwiches and bread products.