Spring Foods offers fresh bread minus preservatives, artificial flavors thanks to innovative packaging, traditional baking techniques

“The big macro trend that is going on in all food is there are a lot of preservatives or artificial ingredients or artificial flavors” and added sugar that do not need to be in bread, but have been added over the last 30 years, Essential President Kevin Brouillette told FoodNavigator-USA at Natural Products Expo West last month.

Increasingly, he said, consumers do not want these extra ingredients – they want simple, clean and healthy food, but they also want flavor and convenience – such as long shelf life.

Spring Foods skips the added sugar, preservatives​

Spring Foods is meeting this demand and helping people understand that bread can be healthy by removing unnecessary ingredients consumers do not want and using traditional baking techniques and innovative packaging to deliver flavor and shelf life.

For example, “our Essential brand is trying to take bread back to how it was made 10,000 years ago” with just four ingredients: flour, salt, water and a natural yeast that comes from a 140-year-old starter “that has been literally passed down generation to generation that goes into the base of our products,” Brouillette said.

The Essential line is available in French and Italian styles, for consumers who want a softer flavor profile than its Sourdough option, said Brouillette. It also comes pre-sliced with garlic.

Essential is able to deliver freshness for month (instead of days) without preservatives, chemicals or freezing by using “Fresh Seal” packaging that Brouillette says locks in freshness and flavor.

The packaging combined with Essential’s par-baked proposition allows consumers to have fresh bread when they want it because they can safely store it at home and when they are ready to eat it they finish baking it in their oven, Brouillette said.

“People, when they say fresh, the really want to eat it when they want to eat it, which sounds flippant, but a lot of times with artisan bread, you buy it at the store and you really have about two days to eat because of how it is made,” but with Essential’s products and packaging “you have fresh bread whenever you want it and not just two days from the last time you went to the store,” he explained.

Sola invites low-carb, keto consumers back to the bread aisle​

The launch of Essential builds on the success introduction of Spring Foods’ first brand Sola, which promises “mouthwatering taste” with less sugar, fewer carbs and not artificial ingredients.

The line appeals to consumers who have cut back on bread, often to reduce the intake of carbs and sugar, because it does not have the ingredients they are trying to avoid and has lower net carbs than many other breads, Brouillette said.