Sara Lee Soft & Smooth Made With Whole Grain White Bread Is The Best-Selling Loaf of Bread In America Since Its Launch

Sara Lee was the first to market a white bread made with a partial blend of whole-grain flour that would appeal to white bread consumers

Downers Grove, IL - Sara Lee Soft & Smooth Made with Whole Grain White Bread has become the best-selling loaf of bread in America since its launch in July 2005, according to syndicated sales data.

The bread, which was developed for white bread loving Americans who make up the majority of bread eaters in the country, is made with a blend of enriched white flour and a special kind of whole-grain flour, dubbed whole white-wheat flour, that is softer in texture, lighter in color and milder in taste than traditional whole-wheat flour.

Sara Lee's Whole Grain White Bread sold 16.7 million 20-ounce loaves, or $30.2 million of bread, in grocery stores around the country from July 16, 2005, when the bread launched, through Dec. 25, 2005, according to Information Resources, Inc., a leading source of supermarket sales data. Sales through Dec. 25, 2005, are the latest available. The Information Resources, Inc. InfoScan sales data is for grocery stores only and does not include sales at mass merchandise outlets and supercenter stores.

No other loaf of packaged bread had sales as high in that time frame, according to sales that are tracked by Uniform Product Code, or bar codes on each stock-keeping unit. The next best-selling loaf of bread sold 11.7 million loaves in the July-December 2005 time frame, or $24.5 million of bread, according Information Resources, Inc.

"Sales of Sara Lee Soft & Smooth made with Whole Grain White Bread have been an overwhelming success," said Bill Nictakis, president of Sara Lee Food & Beverage's U.S. Fresh Bakery business. "The key to this success was knowing what consumers wanted so that this bread would appeal widely to mainstream consumers rather than to a niche segment. After all, Sara Lee has nine great-tasting 100 percent whole-wheat and whole-grain breads that wheat bread lovers can buy. The challenge was getting whole grains into the diets of tried-and-true white bread lovers. We knew they were interested in the benefits of whole grains but not at the expense of white-bread taste. That's why we elected to market a bread made with a blend of flour in order to retain white bread taste, texture and color."

Sara Lee Soft & Smooth Whole Grain White Bread is made from a flour blend derived from 70 percent bleached white flour and 30 percent whole-grain flour, primarily specialized whole white-wheat flour. The white whole-wheat flour is made from all three parts of the wheat grain - endosperm, bran and germ - but has a softer texture, lighter color and less bitter taste than traditional whole-wheat flours.

Why Not 100% Whole White Wheat Bread?

The product development team at Sara Lee tested numerous formulations of Made with Whole Grain White Bread with consumers. Mainstream white bread consumers objected to the taste and color of the bread when more than 30 percent of the flour was derived from the whole-grain flour.

Results in the marketplace have borne out consumers' preference for white breads that use a blend of whole-wheat flour. At the same time that Sara Lee was launching Made With Whole Grain White Bread, Interstate Bakeries Corp. introduced in select test markets Wonder White Bread Fans 100% Whole Grain, which is made from 100 percent whole white wheat flour.

Sara Lee Soft & Smooth Whole Grain White Bread has outsold Wonder White Bread Fans 100% Whole Grain nearly 3-to-1 in the markets where both products are available from the July launch of both breads through Dec. 25, 2005. In the Wonder test markets, Sara Lee has sold more than 1.1 million loaves of Soft & Smooth Made with Whole Grain Bread compared with more than 386,000 loaves of Wonder White Bread Fans, according to Information Resources, Inc., data. Sales cover the Information Resources data collection markets of Kansas City, Little Rock, Ark., Memphis, Tenn., Mississippi, Omaha, Neb., Sacramento, Calif., and San Francisco/Oakland.

Sara Lee Whole Grain White Bread was named one of BusinessWeek's best products of 2005. In a Good Housekeeping magazine blind taste test, nine of 10 children preferred Sara Lee Soft & Smooth Made with Whole Grain White Bread to Wonder White Bread Fans 100% Whole Grain.

SOURCE: Sara Lee Food & Beverage