Recent Innovations

New Variants of Bread

The bread manufacturers are steadily extending to buns, rusks, atta and soya fortified bread, daliya bread, garlic bread, croissants, diet bread that contains no added sugar and salt. However, most of these new products do not enjoy a national presence. Apart from this, there is the range of the original white bread, small cakes and whole-wheat brown bread.

In addition to this, some manufacturers offer a variety of packs to cater to a variety of tastes and price segments in the bread consuming market.

Some bread manufacturers have also launched rusks.

Packaging of Bread

Bread can be classified into two forms; one is normal bread and the other sliced bread. Normal bread is usually sold loose, but the sliced bread has been packed in different form of packages through the years. When the sliced bread industry came into existence, it was available in normal paper packages and wax-coated paper packages. Wax-coated paper packages were the most preferred medium as it had the capacity to soak in extra oil (Vanaspati), which maintained the overall packaging outlook of the bread. And again wax-coated paper package was capable of maintaining the moisture in the bread, which resulted in better shelf life of the product as against normal paper packages .

Though it provided various advantages, the wax-coated paper package had its drawbacks. It tended to open up in more humid conditions and due to this it resulted in the packages getting infected by ants and insects through unsealed portions.

This led to the emergence of polythene packages in the sliced bread industry in the year 2000 and it is the most commonly found package today. Though it is more costly than the traditional wax-coated paper packages, it is the safest packaging medium, which offers numerous benefits.

The polythene-packaged bread not only offered safe and fully sealed packed product, but also offered the producers an opportunity to create a variety of aesthetic packages to lure the consumers. Transparent packages are also used where the product is visible to the customers in order to create confidence in their mind. However, even today some of the leading bakers in the city use the traditional wax-coated paper packages.