7 minute read
Category Insight
All Wrapped Up
BY ANNIE HOLLON
From pita to tortilla and more, the flatbread category is everchanging in versatility and product type. The catch-all category for the unleavened goods continues to thrive in the market as the exploration of new dietary habits and cuisine introductions shift consumer habits.
Ridgefield, NJ-based Toufayan Bakeries produces a number of flatbread products and varieties across cultural cuisine types in its product portfolio, including naan, pita bread, tandoori flatbread, tortillas and wraps, in addition to other baked goods offerings. With a range of traditional flatbread types, newer trends like keto-friendly and gluten-free varieties are opening doors for Toufayan. The company announced Keto Pita and Keto Wraps at the IDDBA 2022 tradeshow and currently carries three gluten-free tortilla wraps.
Greg Toufayan, owner of Toufayan Bakeries, shared that the rising trend around health and wellness, while new to some, has been around in a number of ways for a long time … and it’s always been a disruptor.
“Health and wellness, and people’s opinions as to what’s good for them, is always going to change, and so that disrupts everyone’s business,” Toufayan said. “Disruption to us equals opportunity, and it’s a little bit easier for us to quickly jump and do something.” Change starts at the ground level, and ingredients become even more important to help flatbread producers make the switch to creating gluten-free and keto goods. These trends don’t come without their trials as new ingredients impact production and require bakers to try again and again to find solutions that work with the equipment and resources they currently have.
Toufayan noted that even though the company’s equipment works well, when it comes to adapting to keep up with consumer trends, bakers have to do the modifications and work from what they have at their disposal.
“If you have to do something quick,” he said, “you’ve got to be able to make something on your own.”
On the tortilla side, the industry benefits from corn — one of the most popular varieties of tortilla — already being a gluten-free ingredient. However, a major influx in growth due to the pandemic has caused tortilla manufacturers to seek new varieties to appease and fulfill consumer demand.
Jim Kabbani, CEO of the Tortilla Industry Association (TIA), shared that impacts from the supply chain and the war in Ukraine — which until early August had halted the export of grain — have forced tortilla companies to find alternative ingredients and substitutions.
“A lot of the work that we’ve done in this regard at TIA has been to help them find alternative ingredients and figure out things like, ‘Does that particular alternative present any challenges in and of itself?’ in regard to either formulation or appliance pricing, and how to deal with that,” Kabbani said.
Among the alternative ingredient options, flour derived from lentils, chickpeas and cauliflower have helped tortilla manufacturers keep up with demand, which caused major growth in the category due to the pandemic.
Kabbani noted that when the pandemic lockdowns hit, a huge shift in tortilla consumption directed business away from restaurants and toward retail.
“The demand for the retail side of tortilla has just skyrocketed and pretty much doubled,” he said. “It kind of filled up an emptiness on the food service side.” Yet that growth didn’t slow when foodservice outlets restarted their kitchens for pickup and delivery. Though restaurants were beginning to reopen, consumers continued to purchase tortillas for at-home consumption.
“The types of tortillas in demand have maintained their projected ratios prior to the pandemic,” Kabbani said, “but the volumes have increased quite a bit.”
With the inclusion of nontraditional flours and ingredients, R&D in tortillas has centered around replacement and substitution ingredients and how they affect formulation. As a result, tortilla manufacturers had to ramp up production but faced a challenge seen broadly across baking: labor shortages and supply chain issues.
“It made things a little crazy,” Kabbani said. “The demand for labor increased, and the ability to meet that demand has been rather difficult.”
Victor Hugo | director of operations | Pan Pepin
© Vladislav Noseek on Adobe Stock For Brad Sterl, president and founder of Pittsfield, NH-based Rustic Crust, issues with the supply chain have impacted every aspect of his business. With a company that produces an array of flatbreads ranging from shelf-stable pizza crusts to premium frozen pizzas to products for foodservice, disruption in the supply chain has hit particularly hard in the form of raw ingredients.
“Wheat prices have gone through the roof,” Sterl said, also noting that oils and non-GMO and organic ingredients have become more difficult to obtain. “On the premium side of the category, some manufacturers that were producing ingredients chose not to make organic ingredients or some of those more premium ingredients. And they’ve started focusing on the items they can produce at higher volumes and higher margins.”
Beyond wheat and other ingredients, Sterl also noted that corrugated packaging costs, which impact nearly everyone in the pizza space, have gone up due to fuel indexes. With prices increasing from 20 to 30%, companies are forced to put in larger orders than normal in hopes of getting a higher percentage of packaging in on time.
Outside the continental US, labor shortages and supply chain issues still impact bakeries like Pan Pepin. The Puerto Rico-based bakery faces similar challenges in its operation but faces steeper cost issues due to the need for importing ingredients from the mainland.
“I believe that this is one of the most difficult issues that we are having right now, not only in tortilla but also in bread,” said Victor Hugo, Pan Pepin’s operations director. Beyond issues with the supply chain, increased labor costs have also impacted the bakery’s operation.
In the face of supply chain shortages, Hugo looks to increase efficiency in the bakery and replace ingredients as needed. To overcome some of these challenges, Pan Pepin relies on solutions from suppliers like Corbion and J&K Ingredients to keep R&D running smoothly and also ease labor.
As Toufayan Bakeries looks to the future for more product innovation, the company is focused on equipment that can use mother dough in its pita bread, combining trends like sourdough with traditional pita techniques.
In 2019 Toufayan visited the stilloperating bakery in Eqypt where his grandfather once baked more than 100 years ago, and he has visited Armenian bakeries where their techniques spark inspiration.
“My dream [production] line would be fully automated and could use the same starter/mother dough technique for a super high hydration dough that they do in the old world,” he said.
The move toward automation in bakery continues an upward tick as challenges with labor shortages remain the industry status quo. Hugo shared that though Pan Pepin has a machine that can move more than 800 packages an hour, the bakery is looking to buy another line that can move nearly twice as many in the same time.
“Throughout the last two years from staffing shortages, we’ve really invested a lot more in equipment where we were running short staffed or areas where we would normally have hourly workers or production workers,” Sterl said, pointing to the critical need for labor solutions. While a lot of hand application is involved in his production, investment in equipment that feeds people on the growth in store for the future, even if the amount of growth might remain a mystery.
“I do see the idea of consumers moving more into some of these types of products and, depending on what happens with the economy as they go forward, I would say the category moving forward in the next 12 to 18 months would be stable,” Sterl said. “I don’t see any magic increases, but I do see, from our end of it anyway, the pretty stable potential for some customers to shift into this category.” CB
line ingredients more efficiently grants greater accuracy in portion control.
Kabbani also noted that due to the uptick in tortilla demand, an increase in automation is still needed even with significant equipment backlogs, upwards to a year in some cases. New innovations like high-pressure water jet mixing have also piqued the interests of tortilla manufacturers.
Flatbreads of every variety have stood the test of time across cultures, and all sectors of the category see continued
The pandemic caused the demand for retail tortillas to nearly double.
