As a bakery that offers more than 13,000 products worldwide, Grupo Bimbo understands consumers’ growing nutritional needs. To stay in tune with modern attitudes toward food, the bakery has taken steps to enhance its R.&D. process through its Wellbeing pillar of the company’s sustainability strategy, which also includes Planet, Community and Associates pillars.

In 2018, Grupo Bimbo defined its Nutritional Guidelines, which included five elements of health and wellness: consumption patterns, targeted consumers, clean label levels, nutritional profiles and external validation.

“We changed from ‘good for you’ and ‘better for you’ — those classifications only regard the nutrients they have — to classify products in the way we consume them, along with the dietary patterns that each country may have,” said Patricia Villalobos, R.&D. global vice-president, and co-leader of the Wellbeing pillar.

Now, Grupo Bimbo categorizes its products two ways: daily and occasional, based on the frequency need for each product. This also is based not only on the company’s view of its foods and how they should be consumed but also on dietary patterns and regulations in the countries where they are sold.

Based on these classifications, Grupo Bimbo developed specific nutritional profiles.

“Occasional gives us more options for including certain ingredients such as sugar, salt and fat at higher levels — not high levels — in addition to the fiber, protein and whole grains,” Ms. Villalobos explained.

The company analyzes formulations according to the countries and regions where they’re produced to ensure the profiles are in accordance with those specific standards and regulations.

Ms. Villalobos, who has a Ph.D. in biochemical engineering and an extensive background in food development, works closely with Grupo Bimbo R.&D. teams to formulate solutions that can be applied to products across the board.

“We are working hard to provide solutions to achieve our goals,” she said. “We have different enzymatic solutions for eliminating emulsifiers, and we are working to reduce sugar though bulk agents without affecting the clean label.”

Editor’s Note: This is the third installment of a four-part series exploring Grupo Bimbo’s sustainability strategy. A future article will explore the bakery’s Associates pillars. Click here to read about the company's Planet pillar and Community pillar.