Food Reformulation – the good news for white bread!
You may or may not have heard the term “reformulation” when it comes to food. What it means is that the recipe is adjusted or ingredients changed in the food to make it more nutritious, by reducing calories and some specific nutrients. The focus when it comes to reformulation is generally on processed foods that are consumed widely and frequently by consumers.
The Food Reformulation Taskforce is a partnership between the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) and Healthy Ireland and it is their job to help food producers to work on their reformulation projects. In Ireland, this mostly means reducing salt (by 10%), sugar (by 20%), saturated fats (by 10%), and calories (by 20%) in processed food and drinks. It is a voluntary reformulation programme that runs between 2021 – 2025, so we’re well progressed along the road.
So what has any of this got to do with your white sliced pan? Well, we know that bread contributes to energy (calories) as it is made mostly of carbohydrates (which we need for energy by the way). Bread does NOT contribute to the fat numbers as it contains no added fat, and in fact has less than 3% fat overall, making it officially low fat.
Bread contributes a little to the sugar intake, but again, there is NO added sugar in our white sliced pans, so the sugar measured is through conversion of the starch in the carbohydrate into sugars for digestion (we talked about this in an earlier blog “How Much Sugar Is there in Bread?”). Finally, a little salt is needed to control the speed of the yeast and to strengthen the gluten when you bake bread (again, we have an earlier Blog about this called “Bread & Salt”).
The 2023 progress report from the Reformulation Task force reported that breads had made progress in reducing sodium (i.e., salt). White bread in particular showed a reduction of 17% which was described as a “statistically significant…decrease in sodium” in the report - very good news and the result of the hard work done by our bakers!
Interesting, the 2023 report stated that “The declared nutrition labels on these products are a reliable source of information for monitoring salt and sugar composition”. The Nutrition Declaration is required on all our members’ loaves (and all pre-packaged foods in fact) by law to explain how many nutrients are in our bread. The Nutrients must be declared per 100g but there is an option to show them per portion too. So the nutrition panel of a sliced pan typically looks like this:
|
|
Per 100g |
Per 38g Slice |
Recommended Daily Intake* |
|
Energy (kJ / kcal) |
366kJ / 86.6 kCal |
139.1kJ / 32.9 kCal |
2000kCal (women) / 2500 kCal (men) |
|
Fat of which Saturates |
0.5g 0.1g |
0.19g 0.038g |
75g (women) / 97g (men) 24g (women) / 31g (men) |
|
Carbohydrate of which Sugars |
17.7g 0.8g |
2.93g 0.3g |
267g (women) / 333g (men) 27g (women) / 33g (men) |
|
Protein |
3.3g |
1.25g |
45g (women) / 55g (men) |
|
Salt |
0.4g |
0.152g |
6g (women & men) |
*Data from the British Nutrition Foundation
On the right you can see the Recommended Daily Intake and our white bread falls way below these in all cases. So what’s the take-home message? Well, white bread continues to be a good provider of your daily nutrients, the levels of salt have reduced significantly over the years, so you can continue to enjoy it every day as part of your balanced diet!
For more information:
- British Nutrition Foundation