Packaging Bakery Products

Packaging is a priority for all processed foods. Attractive packaging helps the food to move off the shelves. But in the case of bakery products the packaging has to take several factors into consideration. The bakery products could get rancid or soft due to water vapour, and thus the packaging has to ensure that the water vapour neither enters the packaged products nor does it escape from it. There are several forms of packaging material used for biscuits and breads, based on various factors.

Bakery industry in India is the largest of the food industries. However, only 30 percent of its production is in the organized sector. The annual production of bakery products includes breads, biscuits, pastries, cakes, buns, rusks, etc. Bakery products have been an important part of balanced diet for thousands of years. They are an important source of nutrients viz. energy, protein, iron, calcium, and several vitamins. They contain high nutritive value and are manufactured from wheat-flour, sugar, baking powder, condensed milk, ghee (fat), salt, jelly, dry fruits, various essences and flavouring, etc.

Different types of bakery products can be classified as dry and moist. Dry products comprise of biscuits (soft, hard, cookies, crackers and cream wafer biscuits), while moist bakery products consist of breads (all types), buns (including dinner rolls and pizza bread), and miscellaneous (like cakes, pastries, doughnuts, muffins, etc.). Bakery products can be prepared from micro-scale to the extremely large scale.

This wide range of products varies greatly in terms of their proximate composition, Aw, pH texture and other sensory attributes. The keeping quality or the stability of any food product depends on the above factors and a large variation can cause changes in the modes of deterioration due to various spoilage mechanisms involved. Shelf life of a product terminates once any one of these deterioration modes crosses the critical limit.

Of course, we know that in general the packaging of a product must appeal to the potential customers, must enable the product to stand out against other competing products, and also serve as an effective advertising tool. The packaging must also give detailed information about the product such as composition of the product, nutritional value, price information, etc. But besides these general parameters, the successful packaging of bakery products must incorporate other characteristics.