Plum-Good Improvements

Healthier baked goods are an attractive market these days. According to Baking Management magazine, at the end of 2009, 68% of Americans were reportedly taking steps to improve their eating habits and consume more healthful foods. Packaged Facts, Rockville, MD, has reported that 62% of U.S adults were conscious of the need for more fiber in their diet. While sales in the overall bakery category have remained relatively flat, sales of whole-grain and high-fiber bakery products have increased 9% per year during the last four years, according to the International Food Information Council (IFIC), Washington, D.C. Also, IFIC has found that more than 80% of consumers are aware of the link between fiber and digestive health.

“We asked CuliNex to make great-tasting bakery products with Sunsweet ingredients that would have a healthier profile,” says Thomas Leahy, president, CropSource International, LLC, Walnut Creek, CA. “Having formulas and data to show commercial bakeries is very important to our sales efforts. Our overall challenge at Sunsweet is to increase the use of prunes in the industrial ingredient market. For most commodities, 60% to 80% of their output goes to industrial ingredients, but for prunes the figure is only 10%. We feel there is huge potential to grow that market.” Surprisingly, one of the things holding Sunsweet back has been a technological hurdle. “Twenty years ago, 0.2% of pitted prune products would still have pit fragments in them. That really represented an unacceptable level of defects. Now, with laser sorting and better process control, pit fragments have been reduced to 0.004%,” explains Leahy.