The best thing since sliced bread? Even more bread, it seems. Despite such challenges as the low-carb craze and fluctuating commodity costs, the American staple remains a favorite in all dayparts and restaurant segments.
In fact, restaurants continue to explore more sophisticated bread offerings to please increasingly educated diners and differentiate their concepts from the competition.
“[Bread] can be a tremendous driver as far as why people choose to go to a restaurant,” says Aaron Noveshen, owner of The Culinary Edge, a consulting firm in San Francisco. “It is something craveable and warm, and it’s often the first thing someone tastes, so not taking it seriously can be very detrimental.”
It also is a great way to communicate a restaurant’s message to a consumer base that has a newfound awareness about quality and health, says Johnson and Wales University chef on assignment Peter Reinhart.
“With the appreciation of good bread that Americans in general have come to in the past 15 years or so of the American bread renaissance, restaurant owners know that customers are going to judge the restaurant as much by bread as by the other items on the menu,” says Reinhart, who also is the author of the cookbook, “Whole Grain Breads: New Techniques for Enhanced Flavors.”
This march toward bread enlightenment shows little sign of stopping, as customers who discover high-quality or artisanal breads at bakeries or high-end restaurants come to expect it wherever they dine.
“After [a guest] experiences a really high-quality bread, it’s hard to go back,” Reinhart says. “The standards are raised, and restaurants become challenged to keep up with those benchmarks.”
Ali Pandey, executive bread baker for the New York-based B.R. Guest Restaurant Group, says the company’s bread helps it define the character of its restaurants and adds to the dining experience in a perceptible way.
“From the moment you sit down, [bread] should be something that strikes you,” he says. “It should be something different from what other people do. Something that is not the norm.”
Pandey tailors the bread programs at each of B.R. Guest’s restaurants to suit that concept’s menu and atmosphere. The restaurants’ bread baskets include many signature options, including broken flat bread at Blue Fin and a doughnut-shaped ring of bread at Primehouse, both in New York.
Pandey says that on a busy day he and his bakers can make more than 2,200 pounds of dough. They produce 17 different types of dough, which can be made into 30 to 40 kinds of bread.
With a program dedicated to baking custom bread for each restaurant, it seems that customers might fill up on bread and order less food. However, Pandey says, B.R. Guest has observed that as bread consumption increases, so do dessert sales. The correlation between bread and dessert consumption is a mystery, but Pandey theorizes that good bread at the start of a meal can spark guests’ interest in how the meal will end.
Operators in all segments report that their customers are expressing an increased interest in healthful options, including whole grains and “good” carbohydrates. Luckily for bread makers, customers largely are over the Atkins and other no-carb and low-carb diet crazes, says Tom Gumpel, director of research and development for Richmond Heights, Mo.-based Panera Bread Co., operator or franchisor of 1,167 bakery-cafes under the Panera Bread and St. Louis Bread Co. names.
In mid-August 2007, Gumpel removed all low-carb breads from Panera’s cafes.
“As an artisan baker, that low-carb craze was just the Antichrist to me,” he jokes.
However, he is quick to point out that the low-carb fad had positive aspects for bread makers, as it made Americans more aware of different types of carbohydrates, such as the whole-grain breads that are all the rage now.
“I’m glad that [no-carb craze] is behind us,” Gumpel says. “But I’m very thankful for the whole Atkins thing. If I could do it all over again, I would not have society avoid that. Because without Atkins we wouldn’t be where we are now with whole grains. I think there are a lot of good things that came out of it.”
Susan Reid, editor of “The Baking Sheet” for the King Arthur Flour Co. in Norwich, Vt., says consumers are very interested in buying whole-grain breads that taste good, but the nuances of whole grain can be confusing to newcomers.
“There are a lot of labeling issues that can be confusing,” she says. “If you want to label something ‘whole grain,’ it has to be 51 percent whole-grain flour. You could put 20 percent whole-grain flour in something and label it ‘whole-wheat bread,’ but you might not be getting a significant portion of whole grain.”
Panera customers are asking for more whole-grain bread and breads made with different types of grains, Gumpel says. But some people, especially children, still want something that is soft, tender and sliceable for sandwiches like white bread. One possible solution Gumpel mentions is white whole-wheat bread, made from a type of albino wheat. It has all the fiber and nutritional value of traditional whole-grain bread, Gumpel says, but tastes sweet and looks soft and creamy like traditional white bread. Children respond well to the appearance and flavor, Gumpel says, and their parents like that the kids are eating something healthful and made with whole grains.
“The white wheat bread looks like white bread and has a softer, sweeter quality to it like white bread,” he says. “But it is really a whole-wheat bread.”
Quality bread is the basis of Panera’s concept and the driver of its salad and sandwich sales, Gumpel says.
“It’s so key to [Panera’s] brand, sandwiches and marketing,” he says. “If Panera loses bread, it loses everything.”
Customers see bread as an indicator of quality in restaurants across all segments, from fine-dining to quick-service restaurants, says Johnson and Wales’ Reinhart.
“Jack in the Box is even serving a ciabatta bread,” he says. “They took what was an artisan bread found only in a few bakeries around the country at first, and with new technology making it possible to mass produce this very difficult bread, they’re now serving a pretty decent ciabatta bread for their sandwiches, and from what I can tell it is a huge success for them.”
San Diego-based Jack in the Box, operator or franchisor of more than 2,020 restaurants in 17 states, features four items on ciabatta bread, including a bacon and cheese ciabatta burger, a chipotle chicken sandwich, a breakfast sandwich, and a sirloin steak and cheddar sandwich.
But delivering quality bread in large amounts is not without its challenges. While most operators feel the crunch of escalating commodity costs, bread makers are particularly sensitive to the escalating cost of wheat. The cost of flour has risen dramatically since farmers started growing corn for ethanol production on acreage that previously was used to grow wheat.
“Commodity cost is the biggest challenge for us,” Gumpel says. “When we’re purchasing somewhere like 125 [million] to 130 million pounds of flour a year, it creates huge challenges when that flour almost doubles in price.”
The rising costs present a challenge for bakers, Reinhart says, because customers still expect bread to be free when they get it at a restaurant.
“I could see people someday being educated to pay for bread at a restaurant,” he says. “But if you are going to charge, you had better serve really good bread.”