Formulating Whole-Grain Snacks

America is a nation of snackers whose citizens consistently fall short of consuming their recommended allowance of whole grains. We do so to our detriment, though, as nutrition and public-health experts have been telling us for years that diets rich in whole grains are linked to reduced risk for stroke, type 2 diabetes and heart disease; improved weight management; reduced risk for asthma, inflammatory disease and colorectal cancer; healthier blood pressure levels; and stronger carotid arteries. And that’s just for starters.

So, how do we head our whole-grain consumption in the right direction? By turning our snacking habit into the bridge that closes our growing grain gap. Whole-grain snacks offer manufacturers opportunities for revamping longstanding formulas—and introducing new ones—to capitalize on grains’ high-profile health benefits. Making those revamps more practicable is a slew of wholegrain ingredients that are models of technological innovation.

The grain gap

You won’t hear Cynthia Harriman making excuses about not getting enough whole grains. As director of food and nutrition strategies at the Whole Grains Council, Boston, she appreciates firsthand their widely documented health benefits. Yet she is clear-eyed about how far we still have to go to meet even minimum recommended intake levels. In its 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, USDA called on adults to derive at least half their grains from whole sources. Beyond that, USDA set an intake floor for those ages 9 and above at three or more servings of whole grains per day. One serving equals about 16 grams of whole-grain ingredients, or—translated to foods—a slice of whole-wheat bread, a half-cup of brown rice, or a cup of whole-grain breakfast cereal.

How are we measuring up? “There’s good news and bad news,” according to Harriman. Working with the NPD Group, Port Washington, NY, the Whole Grains Council found that, although intake stayed flat from 1998 to 2005, since 2005—and the release of the most-recent Dietary Guidelines—consumption has risen 20%. “The bad news is that we’re still averaging under a serving a day.”

This, Harriman thinks, “is where snacks can play an important role.” After all, if you want people to consume more of something, you should deliver it in a food they already eat a lot of—like snacks.

“People today are in such a hurry-up mode that they don’t take time to sit down and eat a healthful meal,” says Randal Robinson, director of sales, southwest, 21st Century Grain Processing, Kansas City, MO. “If they can grab a snack with more whole grains, in their minds they are doing the next-best thing.”

From naughty to nice?

Providing whole grains via snacks has its detractors. “There are some in the nutrition community who cry foul if we start looking at making cookies and sweet baked goods better for you,” says Rhonda Witwer, senior business development manager, nutrition, National Starch Food Innovation, Bridgewater, NJ. “But people like to eat those foods. So we need to have increased nutrient density and increased whole-grain fortification wherever we can get it.”

Putting this belief into practice could pay profound public-health dividends. “The addition of whole grains to the diet needs to be as broad as possible,” says Bill Bonner, senior vice president, R&D/technical sales, 21st Century Grain Processing. “Snacks are only a logical inclusion as long as all health-related criteria—fats or oils, sugars, sodium, etc.—are in balance.”

A tricky transformation

A balance is not always easy to achieve. Whole grains have been bit players in commercial food processing, in part, because they present a constellation of production and marketing challenges. Whole grains, quite simply, are different from their refined counterparts, and those differences can translate into unfamiliar manufacturing behaviors and unenthusiastic consumer acceptance.

“Anytime you change a formula, obviously, there are moving parts,” says Kyle Marinkovich, marketing manager, bakery category & Horizon Milling, Cargill Health & Food Technologies, Minneapolis.

From a processing standpoint, the bran and its fiber throw a wrench into things. Fiber is notoriously thirsty, with a nearlimitless capacity to suck up formulation water. “When you put whole grains and whole-grain flours in doughs, the doughs tend to get what we call ‘bucky,’ because the fiber continues to absorb water,” says Witwer. “And so you mix and mix and you think you’re doing OK, and then 10 minutes later, the fibers are still absorbing water and you end up with dry dough.” The solution is to increase the dough’s moisture content and plan for longer hydration and bake times, to absorb all that extra water and drive it off in the oven. Whole grains can also hamper a baked good’s rise, making lower-profile snacks like crackers, chips and sheeted bars better candidates for inclusion than lofty cakes and breads. Some attribute the volume deficit to insufficient gluten in the whole-grain flour and, indeed, some alternative grains, like rice, quinoa and corn, are virtually gluten-free. But the real culprit, at least in the case of wholewheat flour (which is actually fairly high in gluten), is the knife-like action of the bran.

Bran’s rough edges “cut through the gluten strands and make it difficult for something with high whole-grain content to rise,” Harriman explains. Helpful counterstrategies include gentler and shorter mix times—not always an option when you have to mix in all that added water to accommodate the fiber in the dough. There, adding ingredients like vital wheat gluten, dough conditioners and dough strengtheners can help set dough structure and bolster finished-product volume.

Similar volume issues plague whole-grain expanded and extruded snacks—and for similar reasons. Products puff best when their formulas are maximized for starch; fiber, fat and protein, by contrast, merely weigh down expansion. The presence of the fibrous bran, the germ’s lipids, and high levels of protein in whole-grain flours, crowd out starch and yield a compact, densely textured expanded piece.

As a solution, Bonner suggests using whole-grain brown rice flour, which, because of its chemical composition, “is a practical base in these types of products.” Without as much fat, fiber or protein as other whole-grain flours, it permits a more vigorous puff. “It is often the primary ingredient, followed by lower levels of other whole grains,” in expanded whole-grain snacks. Another trick for boosting expansion is to add starches from wheat, tapioca or rice “at some lower level—20% to 30%—and balancing the final consumer product to above 51% whole grains,” he says.

Whole grains get stealthy

Assuming you overcome the technical difficulties, there remains the question of how well your snack’s new whole-grain sensory profile will fly. Whole grains’ darker color, coarser texture and more-pronounced flavor don’t always jibe with consumers’ expectations for light and fluffy buns, cookies, crisps and other goodies.

Within the past decade, that’s begun to change as white whole-wheat flours that look, taste and feel like refined flour, but have all the nutrition of whole grain, have entered the market.

The first to appear, in 2004, was from ConAgra Mills, Omaha, NE. By applying a patented milling technology to a proprietary strain of wheat with a lighter-colored bran coat than traditional red wheat, the company was able to develop a lighter-colored flour with a finer particle size closer to that of refined flours. Because it still contains the native proportions of wheat bran, germ and endosperm, it’s a 100% whole-wheat flour with 12 grams of fiber per 100 grams of flour—more than four times that of refined.

Cargill, through its Horizon Milling affiliate, has tossed its white whole-wheat hat into the ring with a proprietary white whole-wheat flour made from a specially chosen strain of white spring wheat subjected to what Marinkovich describes as “advanced milling technology.” The resulting fine-grained, bake-friendly flour contains all the components of the whole grain.

Improved baking performance is a particular boon. “We’re continuously bake-testing and selecting for key characteristics: volume, color, texture,” Marinkovich says. “One of the things we have found in our bake-testing is that, relative to other whole wheats, with our ingredient you get better volumes, and you need to add less vital wheat gluten. You get a lot more mixing and process tolerance. And then you get a finished product that has the attributes consumers prefer—mild taste, soft texture, light color.”

Another new grain-based ingredient is isolated wheat aleurone, the layer of the bran that “sits on the edge of the endosperm,” Marinkovich explains. It’s isolated because “that’s where you concentrate a lot of the ‘goodness,’ so to speak, of whole grains,” he continues. “It’s high in fiber and vitamins and minerals. Isolating that layer allows us to deliver concentrated whole-grain nutrition.”

Isolated wheat aleurone is not a whole grain itself, but the product contains 45% dietary fiber and high concentrations of vitamins B6 and E, as well as potassium, magnesium, calcium, iron and zinc, and antioxidants like tocopherols and tocotrienals.

“It has got a neutral color, a very fine texture and a neutral taste,” Marinkovich says. “So, you can put it into products to deliver that nutrition, and still have an appealing sensory performance.”

Flax, although not a grain, per se, is becoming popular in whole-grain mixes. A key reason is nutrition. “The way we have explored some of the health benefits of flax, we’ve explored them almost as if it were a whole grain,” says Kelley C. Fitzpatrick, M.Sc., nutrition consultant, NutriTech Consulting, Winnipeg, Manitoba. Flax first gained favor as a vegetarian source of alpha linolenic acid, or ALA, but, she says, “we’ve gone beyond the omega-3s and we’re looking at the lignins, the antioxidants, as well as the fiber component. As a nutritionist, I prefer to promote flax as the whole milled seed, because it’s a nice package. The components themselves work much more effectively when in synergy.” The whole seed is more stable, too. Proper milling can preserve that stability while also producing versatile snack ingredients.

Corn flour redux

While most of the ingredient buzz has centered on white whole-wheat flour, other grains haven’t been neglected. One type of whole-grain corn flour, for instance, is especially amenable to snack formulation and processing. “We start with whole-grain corn kernels, we send them through a dry-mill, and every element of the grain is still there in the same ratio as in the whole grain,” Witwer explains.

What sets the product apart from traditional whole-grain corn flours is the high amylose content of the proprietary hybrid of corn used to make it. “There are textural and processing applications that come out of the high amylose content,” Witwer says. “Because of that, we end up adding extrusion and lightness and volume to whole-grain snacks that traditional whole-grain flours and other whole grains don’t. And it all comes back to the chemical composition of the high-amylose corn.”

The product is also rich in RS2 resistant starch fiber. At about 30%, the flour’s fiber level “is significantly higher than most other whole grains on the market,” Witwer says. “And, when it tests, it tests as insoluble fiber. It behaves like insoluble fiber.” The exception is its behavior with respect to water absorption. She says the product affects required water levels and mix times “not nearly as much” as other whole-grain flours, “because its fiber content is mostly resistant starch, which has a very similar water-holding capacity to flour—not like cellulose, which has a very high waterholding capacity. It doesn’t continue to absorb water like other insoluble fibers.”

The product performs and expands well in the extruder, too, although at the expense of its fiber content. Because RS2 derives its digestion resistance from the natural conformation of its starch granules, the change those granules undergo during extrusion can alter their resistance. “You take the starch through an extrusion process and you gelatinize it,” Witwer says. “And, in that gelatinization process, you break up the structure by which it maintains its fiber.” She notes that, even if manufacturers extrude out all the resistant-starch fiber, “they’ve still got all the whole-grain components naturally present in the corn.”

From flaky to crunchy

Functional whole-grain flours have made it easier to develop mainstream snacks and goodies, but they’re not manufacturers’ only options for adding whole grains to snacks. The whole grains themselves, as well as flakes, extruded pieces and clusters made with them, “have the multiple textures and appearance to add interest to these products, are grain-based, and thus form a basis for whole-grain addition,” Bonner says.

Individual and multigrain mixes can put a product’s whole-grain content right where consumers can see it. And, by coating these clusters and mixes with sweeteners and other flavor systems, they add a twist to the flavor, too. “It could be a sweet cinnamon. It could be a savory cheese. And those can bring sensational flavor development,” Bonner says.

When choosing an individual flake, or the multiple components of a cluster, product appearance and texture will determine thickness, size and grain mix. “There are different flake thicknesses depending on the appearance, the product you want to manufacture and the application,” Bonner says. “You’ll use a whole flake, no matter what grain it is, in a granola bar application, or in a baked bar application. You’ll use what we call a quick flake or a cut flake—a thinner and smaller flake—in clusters, because that’s providing you surface area to hold those clusters together.”

You could even include grain flakes within the matrix of a baked or sheeted cracker dough. In most applications, though, the flake appears as a topical sprinkled on the surface of a chip or cracker. “It’s really about the appearance,” Bonner says. “And that’s where you might use some of the smaller flakes so they do not fall or roll off.”