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Panhandle Farmers See Opportunity in Bakery's Whole Grain White Bread

Posted on: Saturday, 25 March 2006, 15:00 CST

By Jim Stafford, The Daily Oklahoman

Mar. 25--The debut of a "whole grain white bread" marketed by Texas-based Mrs. Baird's Bakeries should be a boon to Oklahoma farmers growing hard white winter wheat, a Panhandle wheat farmer said Friday.

"Oh, gosh yes," said Bob Dietrick of Tyrone in Texas County. "That's an understatement. It will benefit the farmers because there will be more demand."

Until he relinquished the position in January, Dietrick was president of the White Wheat Producers Alliance. The 40-member group includes farmers from the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, as well as eastern Colorado and western Kansas, Dietrick said.

Oklahoma's tiny contingent of white wheat farmers is located almost exclusively in the arid Panhandle. Oklahomans harvest approximately 1 million bushels of white wheat annually from about 20,000 acres.

That computes to about 50 acres per bushel, which Mark Hodges, executive director of the Oklahoma Wheat Commission, said includes both irrigated and dryland wheat.

Expansion of the hard white winter wheat acres into the main body of Oklahoma where hard red winter wheat is dominant faces a big obstacle, Hodges said. The white wheat grain, preferred by the Mexican wheat millers that supply the Mrs. Baird's Bakeries, tends to sprout when it gets wet during the harvest season, he said.

That sprouting degrades its quality and the price farmers receive for their harvest, he said.

Panhandle farmers don't face the sprouting issue as much because of the arid condition in that part of Oklahoma.

Bakeries such as Mrs. Baird's that produce the whole grain white bread prefer white wheat in part because it doesn't have the darker coat of red wheat, Dietrick said.

But it goes beyond mere appearance, he said.

White wheat contains no "tannin," which gives red wheat its color, but it also leaves a bitter taste, he said.

"The one that is going to benefit from this are the bakers," Dietrick said. "You can get by with a third less sugar because you are not hiding the bitter taste.

"I can bake you some whole wheat oatmeal raisin cookies and have a third less sugar in them than you will have in standard whole wheat and mine will taste sweeter.

Mrs Baird's Bread is a subsidiary of Bimbo Bakeries USA, which is based in Fort Worth, Texas, and is the U.S. division of Mexico's Grupo Bimbo. That company claims to be one of the world's largest baking companies with more than 81,000 employees and operations in 14 countries.

"We have a very close relationship with the mill supplier of Bimbo in Mexico City and have intensively worked with them to increase shipments of Oklahoma-originated wheat," Hodges said.

The Sara Lee baking company, which operates an Oklahoma City bakery, is marketing a similar product it calls Sara Lee Soft & Smooth Made with Whole Grain White Bread.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Daily Oklahoman

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Source: The Daily Oklahoman

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