WASHINGTON, DC, US — Investments by the Grain Foods Foundation in market research and scientific studies all are aimed at helping baking and other grain-based companies build their businesses, according to two baking executives.

“The goal is to bring back information that helps,” said Chad Donvito, president of King’s Hawaiian, Los Angeles, California, US. “It really is to be able to drive value for all our investors by understanding what the motivations are for our consumers.”

Donvito is chair of the GFF’s consumer insights working group and he participated in a Dec. 20 GFF investor call that offered an update on the working group’s progress together with Andy Smith who heads the GFF nutrition research pillar task force. Smith is vice president of consumer insights at Flowers Foods, Inc., Thomasville, Georgia, US. The call was moderated by Erin Ball, executive director of the GFF.

Smith, who has been at Flowers for six years, said in his GFF work he is tapping into experience gained earlier in his career at Mars, Inc. when the company was conducting research aimed at helping consumers view chocolate as more than just an indulgence.

“You’ll recall they did all that messaging around chocolate and health,” he said. “That was a lot of work done by Mars and academia to find out what is that health messaging chocolate can do. The one thing I’m confident of is if chocolate can make a health message, bread sure as heck should be able to.”

While the possibilities of research that could be conducted around grain-based foods are vast, Smith said the GFF is looking to “leverage science” in ways that will resonate with the public and ultimately make grain-based foods, including bread, more attractive to consumers.

Smith said it is important for the GFF to address misperceptions “that bread is bad.”

“It’s really interesting hearing doctors say, ‘I tell my patients to eat pita bread and tortillas and not bread,’” he said. “We say, ‘You do realize it’s the same thing, just without the air.’ The misconceptions, whether it’s the consumer or professionals giving advice is pretty strong and worth addressing.”

Areas of health and wellness Smith said the GFF will be studying over time include obesity, the aging population and mental well-being.

“The one area we ended up for this year, Americans are finally ready to talk about gut health,” Smith said. “I think that’s a good thing because as your gut health goes, the rest of your health goes. So that’s the area we are going to focus on this year.”

Smith described a robust process in which the GFF sent out 35 “letters of intent,” solicitations of research proposals resulting in the submission of 17 proposals. He said a key learning from the first year is to more tightly focus the solicitations and the areas of research the GFF would consider.

In addition to reviews by the Scientific Advisory Board, which narrowed the proposals under consideration to three, the GFF conducted a third-party review, which Smith said confers greater legitimacy to the organization’s process. He credited the third-party review to exposing the GFF to a broader range of possibilities.

“It led us to the team at Purdue and the study of the health effects of grain foods on adults, primarily focusing on gut health and whole grains,” Smith said.

Details of the research to be conducted by Purdue have not yet been disclosed, and Ball cautioned that results of the study are unlikely to be published before 2026 but noted that work is under way already.

“It’s a long timeline,” she said. “It’s a significant investment, looking at grain foods and their effects on metabolic health, particularly their impact on blood sugar. Type 2 diabetes is in the news every day as is gut health, as Andy said.”

A single additional project is expected to be funded in 2024.

“We need to feed that pipeline,” she said. “Two, three and four years from now there should be a continuous flow of peer-reviewed science GFF is funding, facilitating.”

Donvito said his committee is focused on driving value for investors by “understanding what the motivations are for our consumers.”

He said insights gathered by the GFF will identify messages consumers want to hear about consuming grain-based foods and also will help GFF understand “paths we should go down on the nutrition side,” when it comes to research.

In determining what areas of consumer research the GFF should conduct, the group will be careful to avoid duplicating data individual companies are gathering on their own.

“The idea is to understand the key drivers, interests and motivations around bread usage across the entire category so we can really understand how to engage consumers,” he said. “How do we grow the category?”

Questions the committee would like answered relate to three areas, the first being macro trends and food culture that drive the bread market, Donvito said. Examples he cited include health and wellness, indulgence, and economic pressure.

“There is a lot going on right now, and I think it is a different time than we found ourselves in the past where health is at, where the economy is at,” he said. “We just want to understand how that is going to impact consumers and what they are thinking about from a bread perspective.”

In addition to the “here and now,” future macro trends will be explored, Donvito said.

On a more micro level, the committee is seeking “foundational bread consumption insights,” he said.

“As time goes on, consumers use bread products differently,” he said. “They might use formats differently. There may be new barriers that say, ‘I used to use bread. Here’s why I’m not doing it anymore.’ They may change, by generation, by ethnicity. What goes on in regions? Trying to understand bread consumption over time. What’s good. What’s bad? What’s changing?”

Related to this area of questioning, Donvito said the committee wants to understand whether substitutes have emerged for bread that consumers may be selecting. He said the industry probably has a “reasonable sense” of how many of the questions posed may be answered but that it is important as time moves forward to ensure its foundational knowledge is current and sound.

A final area for exploration focuses on how sustainability issues affect purchasing decisions regarding bread, Donvito said. The role of ingredients or eating trends such as gluten free or organic could come into play in this research. Similarly, the ways attitudes toward bread differ when consumers eat at home versus away from home will be studied.

“Do they think differently about bread when they walk into a fast-food restaurant versus when they walk into a supermarket?” he asked.

Ultimately, the working group will seek to bring information for investors that helps bakers in their businesses and helps the industry understand what it may say to promote baked foods as well as what would be most important to study on the scientific side.

In response to requests for proposals from market research companies, the GFF received several proposals in December to be reviewed by the task force in January.