Company: Modern Baker
Sector: Health & Life Sciences, Ageing Society
Competition: Innovate UK Better Food
Funding Secured: ~£430k
Modern Baker is the UK’s largest healthy baking brand. In collaboration with Campden BRI and Puratos, Modern Baker intends to adapt a novel ingredient Blend towards several industrially-scalable end-products, including bread, pasta, breakfast cereals, ready meals, biscuits, and cakes. Consequently, the novel Blend will enhance accessibility and the nutritional benefits across multiple commonly eaten products.
21% of all calories consumed are flour-based within the British diet [NDNS,2018]. Ready meals make up 11.5% of UK-household meals [AHDB,2022], and the UK consumes 500,000t of breakfast cereals annually [Statista,2022].
Bread is bought by 99.8% of British households (~11m loaves/day; ~60 loaves/person/year), with the majority being industrially processed. However, its glycemic index is similar to sugary/fizzy drinks [UKFlourMillers,2022].
Substantial research evidence how gut microbiota plays a vital role in metabolic diseases, including type-2 diabetes [Guring,2020], and how improved ingredients in commonly eaten products can have significant positive impacts on reducing obesity, gut inflammation and cancer incidence rates [Fiolet,2018].
In this project, the consortium refocuses from the food industry’s ‘calorie-dense’ approach, towards a new, ‘nutrient-dense’ approach that reformulates the production of carbohydrate-based packaged foods. Bringing the health benefits that specialist baking can bring to digestion (e.g., reducing the glucose release and providing beneficial substrates for the gut microbiota) which current packaged foods often neglect.
The consortium believes the development of this innovative broadly-applicable Blend has the potential to transform existing commercially available processed products.
The Blend will allow the production of alternative and affordable healthy flour-based and baked goods for both B2B (food manufacturers) and B2C (retail and direct-to-consumer).
Not only have we won our 6th Innovate UK award working with the Granted team, we have also secured our highest score. Without their expertise and support, we couldn’t have untangled all the complexities and nuances of a grant application.” – Leo Campbell, Modern Baker.