Welcome to Season 10, Episode 4, of the Troubleshooting Innovation podcast. Joanie Spencer, editor-in-chief for Commercial Baking, is spending this season with Julie Miller Jones, a member of the Grain Foods Foundation Scientific Advisory Board, and Charlotte Martin, registered dietitian and consultant for the Grain Foods Foundation. They’re debunking bread myths to help bakers develop delicious, healthy grain-based products — and help them educate consumers on the health benefits of bread. Sponsored by Lallemand.
In this episode, we discover how commercial bread bakers can bust bread myths through sandwich innovation.
Learn more about this season here, and listen to Troubleshooting Innovation on Apple, Spotify and Google.
Joanie Spencer: Hi Julie and Charlotte. Thanks so much for joining me again this week.
Julie Miller Jones: Nice to be with you.
Charlotte Martin: Thanks for having us again.
Spencer: So, I was in my 20s in the ’90s, and I was a product of the show Friends. And when I think about a sandwich innovation, I think about Joey Tribbiani. So, I’m going to call this the Joey Tribbiani episode. I also love sandwiches, so I am excited to have this conversation with you both about how sandwiches can be a game changer for breaking through consumer misconceptions.
Over the past three weeks, we’ve unpacked a lot of these misconceptions about bread. I think we’ve learned that a lot of times, it’s important to consider bread’s role and larger meal items like sandwiches.
I want to kick this conversation off by asking why it’s important to consider what’s between the slices when thinking about some of these factors that we’ve talked about so far, such as sodium, sugar and other things like that.
Martin: I think that’s a great question. When it comes to the nutritional aspect, some sandwiches can be a lot less healthy due to things like high sodium, processed meats, and then excessive condiments and spreads. This can certainly lead to a sandwich being very high in sodium and added sugar. I had mentioned this in a previous episode, but for example, a 2-ounce serving of sliced deli honey ham can have 500 to 600 milligrams of sodium for just two ounces. Rarely do people stick to just two ounces so that sodium can add up.
On the flip side, you can make a highly nutritious sandwich. That would be by featuring things such as lean proteins like cooked chicken breast, fiber-rich vegetables and healthy fats as spreads like avocado or hummus instead of packing on the mayo. Then really just opting for a home-prepared sandwich is when you can put yourself in control. You get to control the bread, the serving size, and what and how much goes between those slices.
Spencer: Charlotte, do you ever steer people toward certain types of bread when they’re building sandwiches?
Martin: Generally, I do. I tend to steer them towards whole grain breads for the most part, but I make it clear that both types, enriched and whole grains, can be and should be part of a balanced diet, but provided that they try to stick with whole grains for the most part.
Spencer: Right. Julie, I want to tap into your food science perspective on this. What would you say is the key to pairing the right bread for a sandwich in terms of thinking from the food science side? How does that hold up to the filling of a sandwich while also providing benefits for health?
Miller Jones: I think it depends on when you’re going to eat the sandwich. If you’re talking about packing one in a lunch, you might want to think about not so much the kind of bread but using something like a fat-based barrier. You want the fat to deliver nutrients with things such as peanut butter or hummus. They’ll have fiber and protein along with preventing the bread from getting soggy.
Another strategy is just to have a separate bag or wax paper for the juicy things like tomatoes so that they aren’t sitting there all day until you get to lunch and soaking the bread.
Denser breads or breads with more fat, like croissants, may indeed be better. I have trouble recommending those regularly because there are so many more calories and higher in fat in the case of croissants.
The dietary guidelines say to make happier grains whole. One way to do that is if you really like white bread, make one white and one whole grain. It looks attractive, fun and different, and you have half of your grains whole.
Spencer: That’s a great idea. I’m seeing a lot of brands selling half loaves. So, then it allows consumers to mix and match with their sandwiches, I like that.
Miller Jones: If you buy the whole loaf, you can divide it yourself. I’m in a two-person family, so we take part of the loaf and freeze it and usually divide it into thirds. That way the bread is always fresh when you need it because freezing is so much better than refrigerating, because refrigerating stales the bread and freezing doesn’t. You want the bread at room temperature or frozen. You don’t want it in that middling ground, which does prevent mold, but promotes staling. It gives you a tougher crumb.
Spencer: This seems like there’s an opportunity here for messaging on packaging. I don’t often see bread brands giving storage suggestions, such as “Here’s how you can extend the life of your bread: put it in the freezer and not the refrigerator.”
Miller Jones: I realized that if you’re in a small apartment, you may not have the freezer space. But it really is a way to have the nicest crumb. What happens when you put the bread in the refrigerator, the starch molecules in the bread crumb come together. And that’s what makes it tough or stale. What you want is to have a more tender crumb, freezing stops that.
Spencer: We’re talking about sandwiches, and I’m going to bring something up that I found to be a little bit unsettling. There is this rhetoric out there, and it’s called “the sandwich problem.” The Wall Street Journal ran an article where it called sandwiches the saboteur of the American diet. This is a blanket statement.
Miller Jones: It’s clickbait. It drives me crazy because it’s clickbait. You could say soups are the most dangerous thing in the American diet. I just looked up one common company that sells soups, sandwiches, salads and coffee. The average sandwich has about 360 calories depending, as Charlotte said, it’s how much meat you put in it. I say that people should use their jaw meter.
If you’re widening your jaw to get the sandwich in your mouth, you’ve probably got a sandwich that’s got too much filling in it, creating the sandwich problem. We could say we have a pasta problem because you can go into these restaurants and can order a sandwich that has over 2,000 calories and 2,000 milligrams of sodium, but I can order a pasta that does the same thing or be even higher.
The question is, should we eat the amount of either of those that is being served to you, because many times these are ginormous. They should be shared, particularly for people like me, where I don’t need many calories now. Even for the average person on the 2,000-calorie diet, you can’t blow two-thirds of your calorie allotment on a single sandwich, a single pasta, or on a single anything. To just say that the sandwich is dangerous isn’t true. It’s what choices we make in the diet and that’s what is the saboteur of the diet. It made a lot of buzz in the article, but it bothered me.
Martin: Just to add that, a blanket statement like that is problematic because, as we mentioned, sandwiches can be a very nutritious, convenient and affordable meal option. I’ve seen some bread options that can provide you with 6 or 7 grams of fiber and upwards of 10 grams of protein for your sandwich just from the bread alone. If you add some lean protein and then layer in lots of vegetables and healthy fats, you could get upwards of a third or even maybe almost half of your daily fiber needs from a sandwich and a significant chunk of protein, too.
Miller Jones: I think you need to think about getting two of your bread and cereal servings in a sandwich. The objective, I think, is to get two of your fruit and vegetable servings. This can be fruit, for instance, peanut butter with banana and raisins or grated carrot. There are all kinds of creative ways to put vegetables into the sandwich.
That’s one of the ways we fall down so badly, we don’t get enough fiber. Under 5% of us eat the amount of fiber that we’re supposed to. And less than a third eat the number of fruits and vegetables. We aren’t eating the right number of grains, and we aren’t eating the right amount of fruits and vegetables. That’s why we’re in trouble. We’re in trouble, not because of the sandwich, but because of everything else we do.
Spencer: It seemed just a little bit shocking to me because obviously, I don’t think anyone in this conversation subscribes to any elimination type of diet. After all, it’s not healthy or safe, unless there’s a physical response, such as celiac. It’s not a good idea to eliminate one particular food type from your diet.
Then the thing that was a little bit alarming to me was that this is taking it a step further because “sandwiches” are extremely broad. This statement could be anything, we could be talking about white bread and bologna, or we could be talking about whole grains and almond butter. I mean, to make such a blanket statement, that was what was shocking to me, to say that sandwiches in general were a little bit crazy to me.
Miller Jones: I couldn’t agree more. I think this blaming of one thing that this is what’s causing us to be fat, it’s causing hypertension or whatever, is never going to get us to solve the problem. It just causes us to chase red herrings.
Spencer: So, on one hand we’ve Wall Street Journal using the term sandwich problem, but on the other hand, there’s research saying that roughly half of Americans eat a sandwich every day. When you put those two together, it sounds like there’s an opportunity here from a product development standpoint and a marketing standpoint. With the Grain Foods Foundation participating in the Build a Better Sandwich initiative, how do you ladies see this being able to build up bread for industry and for consumers?
Miller Jones: I think that one of the things that has been a missed opportunity in terms of education and publicity is that bread is simply not a platform in which you get the other things into your mouth. Bread, as Charlotte mentioned, has all these nutrients. But even if we take a simple sandwich with the right amount of meat in it, what happens when you eat those two together is that the iron in the meat, the myoglobin, pulls the iron from the bread and makes it more available. It increases the total amount of iron. It’s one plus one equals three, and I think people don’t know that.
I think people don’t know that protein in bread is incomplete. But if I put it with the protein in hummus, which is also incomplete, I now have a complete protein from two inexpensive plant sources. I think those are the kinds of messages that the bread industry can use, and maybe even partner with the legume industry or the hummus industry to show how this helps in a sustainable plant-forward diet that is portable and doesn’t, in many cases, require refrigeration. That’s why it’s so popular to carry within a lunch. There are many kinds of opportunities to do that.
Martin: Incorporating sandwiches into a healthy lifestyle can be straightforward and enjoyable. We talked about the fillings quite a bit now, but also consider portion sizes. A sandwich can be very filling and nutritious without being oversized like we’re so used to right now.
One way to control the size is, of course, to make it yourself and then also how you balance your sandwich-containing meals. So, balancing it with the side of fruits or vegetables rather than what we traditionally serve sandwiches with, like high-calorie chips or fries. I think by following some of these easy guidelines, you can make sandwiches a delicious and very healthy part of any diet.
Miller Jones: You can also even appeal to a high end. For instance, crostini or bruschetta are open-face sandwiches that bring vegetables, they’re interesting, and they’re fun. As an alternative to a chip and a fat-laden dip, this might be a terrific answer. Just think about it differently.
Spencer: I think a lot of bakers are increasing their efforts to educate consumers about how they can use their products in a good sandwich or using their products in a good way. Whether it’s getting adventurous from a culinary perspective or how they use bread in a healthy diet. This is where I’ve kind of seen social media being used positively.
Charlotte, I hope you see that as well. Where bakery brands are using social media to share recipes and provide sandwich ideas for consumers. I even know of one bakery brand that has launched a cookbook. They’re a specialty bread company, and they launched a cookbook for all different sandwich ideas and recipes. If you put that together with Build a Better Sandwich, how can this industry promote sandwich culture as part of healthy eating?
Martin: I think that cookbook is a great idea. What I have noticed just looking at different brands’ Instagram pages, a lot will do some nice and very colorful sandwich imagery. I think that’s helpful. I also noticed some images where the sandwich is incorporated as part of a meal with something like a salad, so it’s not just the sandwich. I think that highlights that a sandwich can be part of a healthy, balanced diet.
Some other things that I’ve seen that I think are great is one bread brand broke down the ingredients in one of their whole grain breads and had a nice little infographic about the different ingredients. They had a couple of seeds in there and some whole grain flours that aren’t normally used and did a nice little infographic on that. I think consumers like to see that and learn more about the ingredients in the bread.
Miller Jones: To add on to that, I think to explain to consumers, using an infographic as an example, of why polysorbate 60 might be in your bread, which is eye-opening.
Martin: I haven’t seen that, Julie. So, it’d be nice if some of them would tackle that.
Miller Jones: Because it’s an emulsifier. What it does is it takes French bread, which lasts a day because it has four ingredients in it, with the various kinds of crumb softeners, polysorbate is one of those, you can extend the shelf life. That makes it less expensive, and it makes it more sustainable. I was upset with the bread manufacturers a while back because one of the bloggers wrote that this compound was the same compound that was in yoga mats. You may remember that incident.
Spencer: Yes.
Miller Jones: So breadmakers rushed to take it out, and I thought that was the wrong strategy. It said to the consumer, “We’ve been putting this in, and we’ve been not telling you about it. And now we know it’s bad, and we are taking it out,” instead of saying “It is here and this is the reason.”
To compare the amount that is in bread to the amount that is in a yoga mat is beyond silly. Breadmakers need to be proud of every single ingredient that’s there, be able to explain why it’s there and know that it is not harmful so that they can counter the adverse messages that you might get from a not-well-informed blogger.
Spencer: That’s a great point. You’re bringing back Food Babe PTSD. But that is such a good point, because there is this general mistrust of food manufacturing and big food brands. There’s this just inherent distrust that consumers sometimes for no reason have. That is a good point to increase the transparency instead of just taking it out.
I think that was around 10 years ago, and I think social media has evolved so quickly over those past 10 years. I think baking companies have learned a lot of lessons about proactive communication versus reactive. That way you don’t necessarily have to reformulate if you can justify your formulation to begin with.
Miller Jones: Even now, the crazy ultra-processed food that we talked about; the system arbitrarily picked foods that had any additive or more than five ingredients. I think this is a perfect opportunity to talk about more than five ingredients might make it more nutritious because we’re adding nutrients. More than five ingredients makes it more sustainable. More than five ingredients make a banana walnut item that might be delicious. Breadmakers need to be out front and say, “There is no science behind five ingredients. This is why we’re putting these things here, and it helps you.”
Spencer: That is such good advice. I do have to say, I just want to applaud the industry for a minute, because I think we have come a long way. There was this sentiment that baking companies needed to be behind the scenes and be under the radar. Especially from a B2B standpoint, we don’t ever want our competitors to know what we’re doing.
We don’t want to reveal our formulas, nobody needs to know what’s going on behind the scenes, especially if they’re supplying a restaurant. I think the industry has come such a long way in transparency. We still have a long way to go, but I do think we’re heading in the right direction. I think a lot of companies are catching on to the importance of pulling back that proverbial curtain and showing there’s nothing to be afraid of with these products. They’re actually very good for you.
Martin: I think also giving their food scientists and bakers a voice, especially in the marketing and the social media. is a great idea, especially if they are working with food scientists who understand how and why those ingredients are there and can speak to them. I think that could be very helpful in educating consumers.
Spencer: Speaking of education, something else that I’ve seen the Grain Foods Foundation do well, is address the industry’s workforce, because they work in the industry, but they’re also consumers. When they’re just going to work every day, sometimes they have this separation between what they’re doing in a manufacturing facility and what they’re eating at home.
I participated in the webinar that you two presented to Lallemand’s workforce. I was so impressed with some of the comments that were coming in on the chat, people who work in this industry were saying “Wow, I didn’t think about this this way.” “This is really interesting.” “You’re opening my eyes.” How do you think internal communication is helping the industry communicate to their end consumers and why is it important?
Martin: I think these internal education initiatives are so important because by educating their employees about the science and nutrition related to their products, they’re empowering their workforce to be more knowledgeable and engaged.
I think this not only enhances the quality of the products that they work on and sell but also fosters a deeper understanding of consumer needs and health trends. I believe employees who are well informed about the health aspects and also the culinary versatility of their products can then better advocate for them and provide valuable insights that can continue to drive innovation and improvement.
Miller Jones: In addition, I think you can make the employee feel proud and defend their product and be proud of what they’re doing.
Spencer: And then also when you think about the shortage in the workforce, I think that it also creates this sense of pride in their jobs and what they’re doing. It creates this connection to their employer so that they are outwardly touting the benefits of the product that they make, but then they feel very connected to that product, and they feel proud to get up every morning and go to work and that’s helping build up the workforce and build that loyalty in the workforce that we need so much right now.
I’m going to close with another ethereal question. I love to just sort of sit back and dream with you both. With all of this conversation around sandwiches and these collective efforts and looking at it from all these different perspectives. Do you think these collective efforts can come together and turn the tide on how people view bread?
Martin: Possibly. I think we really need to get over this low-carb trend first, but I think it’s possible. I think it is working on that innovation piece, but just consumer education and marketing. I think they could change their perspectives. I think there are a few bread companies who are working on that and doing a great job of it. So, I do think it’s possible.
Miller Jones: My ace in the hole is a study that came out published in The Lancet which is the equivalent of the Journal of the American Medical Association in Britain. It’s a review of prospective studies of hundreds of thousands of people, and those people who ate a diet with 50 to 52% of their calories coming from carbohydrates, including bread, lived for four years longer than if they ate keto or less carbohydrates, such as the low carb diet. Living longer should mean a lot to a lot of people. I think that’s compelling data and if we could only get that information out, that might help turn the tide.
Spencer: Yes, that’s a good point. Let’s be honest, this episode is about sandwiches and there’s just not as much joy to be had on a sandwich that has a piece of lettuce rather than two slices of bread.
Well, that wraps up our Joey Tribbiani episode around sandwiches and how bread makers can use sandwich innovation to bust myths with consumers.
Next week will be our last episode, and we are going to talk about a very important topic and that is women’s health. I don’t think that a lot of consumers understand the vital role that grain foods can play in women’s health. So, I’m very excited to dive into that topic with you next week. For now, I just want to say thank you for your time, and your insight and for yet another great conversation.
Martin: Thanks, Joanie.
