Gluten free bread and the lack of ambition
Seventeen years ago, Genius did something that genuinely changed the gluten free bread market in the UK. It put fresh sliced gluten free bread into mainstream supermarkets and, for many people with coeliac disease, made buying bread feel a little more normal. No specialist shop, no waiting for a prescription from the pharmacy and no ‘refreshing’ postage stamp sized slices in the microwave. There was a loaf on the supermarket shelf that looked, broadly speaking, like the bread everyone else was buying.
It was a monumental step forward.
But seventeen years is a long time in food. Since then, almost every part of the food industry has been busy reinventing itself. We have seen an explosion in sourdough, ancient grains, fermentation, high protein foods, high fibre products and breads inspired by baking traditions from around the world. Consumers have become much more interested in where ingredients come from, how food is made and what nutritional value it provides.
And yet, when it comes to gluten free bread, it is difficult to escape the feeling that the industry has been remarkably unambitious.
There are certainly more products than there were in 2009, and some are better than their predecessors. But the fundamental proposition has changed very little. Much of the market is still built around trying to reproduce a conventional wheat loaf without using wheat: soft, pale, sliced, relatively light and designed to sit on a supermarket shelf alongside ordinary bread.
Maybe that made sense seventeen years ago….I’m not sure it still does today.
Perhaps the question shouldn’t be whether gluten free manufacturers can make a convincing imitation of wheat bread, the industry has spent years working on that problem. The more interesting question is why we have not seen a much more ambitious attempt to create a new generation of bread that is naturally gluten free, nutritionally interesting and genuinely desirable in its own right.
Because if we look beyond Britain, the idea that good bread needs wheat starts to look rather strange.
Across the world, people have been making bread and bread-like foods from naturally gluten free ingredients for centuries. Teff has been central to Ethiopian cooking. Corn has produced tortillas and arepas across the Americas. Chickpea flour has been used for foods such as socca/farinata. Rice, millet, sorghum, buckwheat and cassava have all played important roles in traditional food cultures.
These foods were not developed as inferior substitutes for wheat bread. They were developed because those were the ingredients available, and over generations people learned how to make extraordinary food from them.
I believe this distinction really matters.
A injera made from teff does not need to pretend to be wheat bread. A corn tortilla does not need to behave like a sliced white loaf. A chickpea flatbread does not need to apologise for being different.
Yet the modern gluten free industry has largely taken the opposite approach. It has treated the absence of gluten as a technical problem to be solved rather than as an opportunity to rethink the product itself.
The result has been an enormous amount of effort devoted to making starches, gums, fibres and other functional ingredients perform the jobs that gluten normally performs.
There is impressive food science behind this. Gluten is incredibly useful. It gives dough structure and elasticity and allows it to trap the gases produced during fermentation. Removing it while still producing a soft, sliced, fresh loaf is genuinely difficult.
But perhaps the industry's technical success has also become a limitation.
Once the goal is defined as producing something that behaves like a conventional wheat loaf, the solution inevitably becomes more complicated. You need ingredients to replace structure, ingredients to improve texture, ingredients to retain moisture and ingredients to make the finished product stable enough to survive the journey from factory to supermarket shelf.
And there is nothing inherently wrong with functional ingredients. Without them, some of the products we now expect to see on supermarket shelves simply would not exist.
But there is a point at which we should ask whether we have become too focused on solving the wrong problem.
What if, instead of trying to make gluten free bread behave like wheat bread, we designed bread around the natural properties of gluten free grains and pulses?
That could lead somewhere much more interesting.
Imagine a fermented teff bread that embraces the distinctive characteristics of teff instead of trying to disguise them. Or breads based around sorghum, millet, corn, chickpeas, seeds or combinations of grains and pulses that provide meaningful amounts of fibre and protein.
These would not simply be alternative versions of the same white sliced loaf, they could be a different generation of bread.
And that matters nutritionally as well as gastronomically.
There is an opportunity here to develop breads with substantially more fibre, protein, seeds, whole grains and other nutritious ingredients. Instead of asking how closely a gluten free loaf can reproduce the mouthfeel of a white wheat loaf, manufacturers could ask whether they can create a bread that is genuinely better for everyday eating.
That would require a change in mindset.
It would require manufacturers to take risks.
And this is where the lack of ambition becomes most noticeable.
There is a certain logic to the current market. Manufacturers know that consumers are familiar with sliced bread. Supermarkets know how to stock it. Consumers know how to use it. A product that looks like ordinary bread is easier to explain and easier to sell.
But that does not mean it is the limit of what can be achieved.
The food industry has repeatedly demonstrated that consumers will embrace completely new products when they are given a compelling reason to do so. Sourdough moved from specialist bakeries into mainstream supermarkets. Fermented foods have become increasingly familiar. New grains and seeds have moved from health food shops into everyday products.
Why should gluten free bread be different?
Perhaps because the category has spent too long thinking of people with coeliac disease primarily as consumers who need a substitute.
They need something safe, so give them a safe version of the product everyone else eats.
That is understandable.
But it is not particularly ambitious.
People with coeliac disease are consumers too. They can appreciate good bread, interesting ingredients and new food experiences just as much as anyone else. They should not have to choose between an expensive imitation of a conventional loaf and going without.
There is also a commercial opportunity in challenging the assumption that every good gluten free bread needs to be shelf stable.
If we want to create bread from simpler, more nutritious ingredients, we may have to accept that some of the most interesting products will not behave like mass market sliced bread. They may need to be frozen.
That should not automatically be regarded as a step backwards.
Freezing is a preservation method, not a measure of quality. A frozen loaf made with whole grains, pulses and seeds, with a relatively simple ingredient list and excellent nutritional value, could be far more interesting than a fresh loaf engineered to remain soft through a complex system of functional ingredients.
The important thing is to give consumers a choice.
There could be everyday shelf-stable products for convenience, alongside genuinely ambitious frozen breads designed around nutrition, flavour and texture. There could be supermarket ranges inspired by the world's naturally gluten free baking traditions rather than another series of attempts to reproduce the same white loaf.
The technology does not have to disappear.
It simply needs to be used alongside imagination.
And Britain has an opportunity to take this further. If we are serious about developing more resilient domestic food systems, there is a case for investigating crops such as buckwheat, millet and suitable varieties of oats, alongside pulses and other ingredients that could contribute to a new generation of gluten free foods. Agricultural research, food science and manufacturing could be brought together around the question of what genuinely good gluten free bread might look like.
That would be a very different proposition from simply trying to make another gluten free sliced loaf.
Seventeen years ago, Genius helped solve an important problem. It showed that fresh gluten free bread could sit on the shelves of Britain's mainstream supermarkets and look sufficiently familiar to become part of everyday life.
But perhaps the industry has spent the years since then trying to perfect that first breakthrough, rather than asking what should come next.
The next breakthrough does not have to be another slightly softer loaf, another marginally improved recipe or another attempt to make gluten free bread indistinguishable from wheat bread.
It could be something much more ambitious.
It could begin by looking at the breads the world has already been making without gluten for generations. It could embrace grains, pulses and seeds for what they are rather than using them simply as tools to imitate wheat. It could put nutrition alongside taste and texture. It could accept that some of the best products might need to be frozen. And it could recognise that people with coeliac disease deserve more than a technically adequate substitute for something they can no longer eat.
They deserve genuinely good bread.
Seventeen years after fresh sliced gluten free bread arrived in Britain's supermarkets, perhaps it is time for the industry to stop asking how close it can get to wheat.
The more interesting question is what it could create if it stopped trying to get there at all.