The Canadian Wheat Board says exports of Canadian wheat aren’t threatened by the use of flour improvers.
Flour improvers are enzymes added to the flour mix to improve performance and consistency throughout the baking process.
In certain circumstances, bakers can use them to replace high quality hard wheat, such as that grown by farmers in western Canada.
Improvers gained a high profile in 2007-08, when wheat prices hit record high levels.
Processors looked for ways to limit their costs and that included replacing high quality wheat with those improvers.
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The companies that manufacture the improvers ran advertisements in trade publications, telling wheat users they could “reduce the use of costly hard wheat flour” by using improvers.
“That got our attention,” Lisa Nemeth, the CWB’s manager of technical services and marketing strategy, told an international wheat quality conference in Saskatoon last week.
Concern over the possible impact of improvers on demand for high quality wheat prompted an industry group, including representatives from the CWB, the Canadian Grain Commission and the Canadian International Grains Institute, to travel to Europe in June 2008 to meet with the improver companies.
The delegation wanted to know to what extent processors could replace high quality wheat flour with a combination of lower quality wheat and improvers, and whether that could threaten sales of high quality Canadian wheat.
The result of those discussions was a relief.
“After we visited the companies, we came away feeling comfortable that there is a limitation to what improvers can do and there will always be a need for high quality wheat,” she said in an interview after her presentation.
“There is no significant financial loss to producers as a result.”
She said demand for improvers will vary from year to year, depending on such things as wheat prices and crop quality.
When bakers are using high quality wheat, there is still sometimes a need to ensure consistency among different batches of flour and improvers can be used for that purpose.
Nemeth said there might be market situations in which certain buyers can’t afford to buy as much high quality wheat as they might like, so they switch to lower quality and improvers.
“But they’ll often start to get complaints from customers, so when they can afford to buy the high quality wheat again, they will,” she said.
She added that some of the board’s customers of medium quality wheat depend on improvers to boost the quality of their products.
Michael Tilley of the United States Department of Agriculture’s grain marketing and production research centre in Manhattan, Kansas, told the conference enzyme-based improvers are crucial to maintaining the quality of wheat products.
He said stresses such as insects, disease and weather can result in wide variability in flour quality from within the same regions, and improvers will benefit processing and consistency.
