The bread-making quality of hard red spring wheat grown on
the Canadian prairies is slipping.
Officials have known about it for four or five years because
overseas customers have been complaining.
Now Manitoba Cooperator is reporting that Canada Bread is
not happy. Vice-president Connie Morrison said the company spent $1 million
last year buying gluten to supplement Prairie-grown wheat flour so it could get
the desired rise in bread loaves.
Gluten gives bread-making flour strength to stretch and hold
air so loaves rise high, the bread has air pockets and is fluffy.
It’s the high protein content of Prairie-grown hard red
spring wheats that provides the gluten. Canada has long had a high standard for
licencing new varieties so it can maintain high protein content, but that often
comes at the expense of higher yields.
Farmers across the border in the United States grow
higher-yielding, lower-protein wheat varieties and there has been widespread
speculation that Canadian farmers have been planting some of those varieties.
The kernels looks similar enough to slip into the marketing
stream. Proteiin also tends to be high when growing conditions are dry; that’s
not always been the case in recent years.
Canada Bread was bought by Bimbo Bakery of Mexico last year
and Morrison said the company’s bakeries in Mexico have also experienced gluten
shortages with Canadian wheat.
She said Canadian quality has become “inconsistent”.
The Manitoba Reporter article says some believe that has
happened since the Canadian Wheat Board lost its monopoly over export sales.
Now global grain-trading companies handle exports.
Some also speculate that the concentration of marketing in
the hands of fewer companies has reduced blending of wheat harvested from
different regions and varieties to achieve acceptable quality.
Morrison said Canada Bread is looking
forward to changes to Western Canada’s wheat class system starting Aug. 1,
2018, which will see lower gluten wheats removed from the premium milling
Canada Western Red Spring wheat class and to a new class called Canada Northern
Hard Red.