South African bakeries fight rising costs with enzymes 

Bread is a staple food in South Africa but has become much more expensive recently. The average price of wheat has doubled from March 2007 to March 2008, causing bread prices to increase by over 20% in the same period. This is creating tough times for the South African baking industry and it is now looking for ways to cut costs while maintaining quality. Enzymes from Novozymes can help to minimize the impact of soaring costs.

Growing industrial segment
About 60% of all bread in South Africa is produced in small artisan bakeries and 40% by industrial bakeries. Measured in value terms, sales of industrially produced bread rose by 6% from 2006 to 2007, according to Euromonitor figures. The share of the different types of bread made by industrial bakeries in South Africa is shown in Figure 1. Brown bread has gained in popularity in recent years to account for 41% of sales whereas white bread accounts for 51%.

The industrial bakeries are the primary target for South African companies making bread improvers and bread mixes. They are increasingly using enzymes from Novozymes in their formulations.

Savings compared to emulsifiers
In the last 12 months, the price of emulsifiers has increased dramatically on the world market. Increased prices for energy and for raw materials such as tartaric acid are the main causes.

The use of emulsifiers such as DATEM and SSL had been taken for granted by many bakeries in South Africa, but with higher prices, the bakeries are beginning to consider alternatives. Lipopan Xtra is a lipase enzyme that can be used to replace emulsifiers either partially or completely. It works well with the straight dough method that predominates in South Africa.

	Andre diedrick (left) and Vincent Kibare, two Account Managers for Cereal Food based at Novozymes in South Africa. As well as South Africa, they cover other countries in Africa south of the Sahare.

Lipopan Xtra enhances the authentic bread flavors while delivering good dough strengthening just as emulsifiers do. Lipopan Xtra currently gives a cost saving of 40% to achieve a comparable performance.

Caking is a common problem with emulsifiers. “In a hot, humid country like South Africa, the emulsifier can form lumps that are as hard as rock and must be broken up before use,” comments Andre Diedrick, an Account Manager for Cereal Food at Novozymes in South Africa. “Our enzymes, on the other hand, are free-flowing granulates.”

“You also save on storage space and logistics,” he adds. “A typical dosage of Lipopan Xtra is just 10 ppm of the dough. You can replace one ton of emulsifiers with just 10 kg of enzymes.”

This small dosage makes many new customers in South Africa skeptical toward Lipopan Xtra at first. They simply do not believe that such a small amount of enzyme will have the desired effect. That is why Andre Diedrick and his colleague Vincent Kibare perform trials in the Novozymes baking laboratory in South Africa to prove the robustness in industrial scale of Lipopan Xtra. “Slowly but surely we are changing the mindset here, and we now have a wide range of different customers for Lipopan Xtra,” says Vincent Kibare, Account Manager.

Fluctuating wheat quality
The fundamental ingredient of bread – wheat flour – has been in short supply on the world market in 2007 and 2008, and this has also affected costs for the baking industry in South Africa.

Vincent Kibare comments: ”In general, the poorer the quality of the wheat, the more you need to use enzymes to produce good-quality bread. An advantage of Lipopan Xtra is that it strengthens the dough regardless of the quality of the flour. Even with a poor-quality wheat flour, you still get good results.”

Exorbitant ascorbic acid
The price of yet another basic bread ingredient has also risen – ascorbic acid, which is used to strengthen gluten. One kilogram of ascorbic acid rose to the exorbitant price of ZAR 200 in South Africa in June 2008, equivalent to about USD 25 per kilogram. This is a six-fold increase compared to the price of only ZAR 30 per kilogram in June 2006.

China is a prime source of this baking ingredient, but some Chinese factories making ascorbic acid have closed down recently due to strict pollution control regulations being enforced. In addition to the baking industry, ascorbic acid (better known as vitamin C) is purchased by the pharmaceutical industry, which is able to pay a higher price. This has diverted supplies to the pharmaceutical industry and forced the price up.

Novozymes can offer bakers an alternative to ascorbic acid: glucose oxidase. The Gluzyme Mono product can be used as a partial replacement for ascorbic acid to give the same results in terms of dough stability (see Fig. 2). At current prices, using Gluzyme Mono is much more economical than the equivalent amount of ascorbic acid it replaces.

There are also additive effects from using both Gluzyme Mono and Lipopan Xtra together, such as increased loaf volume.

The right platform for growth
Although times are tough for the baking industry, sales of Novozymes enzymes in South Africa have actually performed very well.

A change of strategy at the end of 2006 has been instrumental for establishing the right platform for Novozymes’ baking business in South Africa. To serve the baking industry in the best possible way, management made the decision to concentrate entirely on its primary business: developing, producing, and selling pure enzyme solutions.

During the transition period in 2007, Novozymes helped bakery customers to secure new suppliers of products containing Novozymes enzymes. The changeover has been well accepted by bakeries, and Novozymes now supplies enzymes to bread improver companies and premix manufacturers, who in turn supply the bakeries.

Darrell Ward, Novozymes’ Industry Sales Manager for Cereal Food in Africa among other regions, has been spearheading the implementation of the new strategy: “The enzyme market in South Africa is looking very promising for us with good growth in the industrial baking sector. Much credit goes to the local team of Account Managers in South Africa.”