// home / sonneveld / News / product / Minimize bread waste by reprocessing old bread

News

08 February 2010 - Minimize bread waste by reprocessing old bread (Product News)

Sonneveld has recently launched Sonextra Sustain. This product is a unique starter that can efficiently generate sour dough from wheat bread, thus enabling the process of re-using old bread or out-of-spec bread. Sonextra Sustain is able to close the production cycle in a sustainable manner, as bread will not be downgraded from high quality food to feed or waste.

Bread waste
Bread is massively downgraded from high quality food to feed or waste. Bread is the largest single item in the consumers’ waste bin. Surplus bread in retail, if not devaluated by downpricing at the end of shelf life, will end up as animal feed. Also the overages, production errors and out of spec bread in the bakeries are downgraded to animal feed. It is estimated that 10-25% of high value staple food is thus degraded to feed or worse. At best bakeries or retailers get a small fee when they are able to sell it as animal feed, worst case is that they need to pay for dumping it.

Sustainable bread production with Sonextra Sustain
Sonextra Sustain bread wasteSonextra Sustain is a sustainable solution to the above problem. It is a unique starter that efficiently can generate sour dough from wheat bread. This sour dough can be added to the normal bread recipe and delivers extra taste and flavour, softness (up to 20% softer after 3 d) without deteriorating the bread quality like crumb structure and volume. The pH lowering during sour dough fermentation is fast enough to prevent rope formation by Bacillus subtilis and B. cereus bacteria. On the other hand the acidification is limited and the sour dough delivers no acid taste to the final bread. The composition of the starter is also designed such that flavour precursors are generated from the fermented bread that deliver a nice and more profound bread flavour when baked.
In the meantime nutrients for the starter micro-organisms are liberated to speed up the fermentation. Optimum fermentation times are thus decreased by a factor 3 to 4 (from 36-48 h to 12 h), which enables the bakery to process the left-over and waste bread within 24 h. The lowering of the pH in the sour dough is fast and stabilises within those 12 h to a level that does not give an acid taste when added up to 20% on flour basis in the final bread recipe.

Sustainability
Sonextra Sustain is able to close the production cycle in a sustainable way by serving the three P’s. People will like the profound flavour and softness of the bread. Planet will not be loaded by more waste or animal feed. Profit will be generated as precious food is not downgraded to lower costing feed or waste. Read more about Sonneveld CSR policy

Peter Weegels
Responsible for this innovation is Peter Weegels, I&D Manager at Sonneveld Group B.V., as well as General Manager at EBIC (European Bakery Innovation Centre). He is an international authority in Cereal Science and Bakery Technology after many years of studying, research and product development. In addition to a number of international prizes for best presentations, he also has more than 60 publications to his name in this specific area. Peter is also Chairman at C&E (Cereals & Europe, the biggest grain research association in Europe). In this capacity he chairs the biannual conferences, the so-called Spring Meetings, where grain technologists from right across Europe meet.  Peter is also co-author of the new Wheat Chemistry and Technology. This is the encyclopaedia for grains and grain food technology.

 

More information about Sonextra Sustain >>

Press release bakeryandsnacks.com >>




More news

Contact form Sonextra Sustain

Contact form Sonextra Sustain

Subscribe to Sonmail

Please fill out to subscribe to Sonmail newsletter.

Your details

Company name:
E-mail address:

Click here to unsubscribe for the Sonmail newsletter.