KANSAS CITY, MO – Despite the rise of food-related allergies and increasing demand for allergy-friendly baked goods and snacks, the category isn’t growing as quickly as may be expected, for a multitude of reasons.
Operating a bakery that offers allergy-free products presents a unique set of challenges, including sourcing ingredients, preventing cross-contamination and getting to market.
Here’s how a few retail bakers address the hurdles.
Avoiding Cross-Contamination
For retail bakery customers seeking allergy-free foods, concerns over undeclared ingredients are always top of mind. While food manufacturers follow a long list of precautions to prevent cross-contamination, that doesn’t mean they’re always 100% successful.
Alyssa Sobecki, owner and founder of The Difference Baker in Ashburn, VA, doesn’t take any chances. She operates the only certified allergen-free shared kitchen in the US, crafting baked goods such as brookies and cinnamon roll cakes that omit the top nine allergens, including gluten, peanut, tree nut, soy and sesame.
“I don’t even source ingredients that are made on the same manufacturing lines as nuts, peanuts, soy or wheat,” Alyssa said. “To be certified, we have to test every single month, but we also individually test the vats of ingredients that we get as an added measure.”
Since The Difference Baker makes a few products containing eggs and milk, its vital ingredients are kept separate to avoid contamination.
“We’re very good about handling eggs and milk in our facility,” Alyssa said. “We’ve got separate fryers and once we build out the bigger kitchen, we’ll have separate equipment and a separate part of the kitchen that has the dairy, meat and eggs, as opposed to just the allergen-free side.”
Precise Labeling
Since allergic reactions can range from slight intolerances or gut discomfort to severe responses such as anaphylactic shock, things can get a little tricky in the labeling department.
When bakeries market themselves as allergy-free in any capacity, full transparency about what ingredients are used (and not used) in the kitchen is a must. Patti Furey Crane, owner and founder of gluten-free bakery Mariposa Baking Co. in Oakland, CA, ensures that what the customers see is what they get.
“We thoroughly clean between batches,” Patti said. “Everyone changes their gloves, we sanitize tables, and we clean the equipment. We also clearly label our products with the allergens they have to avoid any miscommunication. If something has an almond in it, we call it a vanilla almond pound cake. So even if you can’t see it, you know it’s in there.”
Sibby’s Cupcakery in San Mateo, CA, is a certified nut-free bakery that also produces a gluten-free cupcake line. Sibby Ross Thomsen, owner and founder, knows how important it is to be transparent with her customers. Because the facility isn’t certified gluten-free, she makes it a point to communicate to her customers that even the gluten-free products could have traces of gluten.
Even though Sibby’s is certified nut-free, the bakery still verifies every step of the process is clean.
“Ideally, the ingredients we use are manufactured in a separate nut-free facility or on separate lines,” Sibby said. “If they are manufactured in a shared facility, we ensure that their lines are tested for allergens by a third party.”
Sourcing Clean Ingredients
There’s no room for error when sourcing ingredients, but obtaining safe ingredients poses its own challenges.
“Our most consistent challenge is how much our ingredients cost,” Alyssa said. “Not a lot of people manufacture clean ingredients in the US, but I think that market will grow as our economy gets stronger and people are diagnosed with food allergies.”
Across the country, Sibby’s Cupcakery faces similar struggles.
“Ensuring all our ingredients remain safe for people with nut and gluten allergies takes constant vigilance,” Sibby said. “Vendors sometimes make changes to their product, manufacturing facilities or distributors that could potentially increase risk, so we continually check with suppliers. It also means there are some products we can’t use, not necessarily because they contain nuts, but because there is potential for cross-contamination in their manufacturing process.”
Even when sourcing ingredients from a trusted allergy-free facility, bakers must do their due diligence to prevent any potential mishaps.
“We use Post Fruity Pebbles for our Bamm-Bamm’s Breakfast Cereal Milk Cupcake,” Sibby said. “Even though we know Post has stringent allergen practices, we call the company to check every box we use just for peace of mind.”
In New York City, a melting pot of baked goods, the same challenges remain. Craig Watson founded Baked Cravings after noticing the lack of 100% nut-free bakeries in the city. To keep things simple and avoid unnecessary contamination, the bakery doesn’t allow any nuts beyond its front doors — no exceptions.
Cultivating partnerships with suppliers that go beyond transactional relationships is key.
“We work with our ingredient providers to make sure what we source is nut-free,” Craig said.
To-Market Challenges
Even when the right ingredients are in place and there’s no chance of contamination, getting products into the hands of the public isn’t easy.
For smaller bakeries, the inability to automate processes and scale up production creates roadblocks that make it difficult to get allergen-friendly foods to market. One of the roadblocks allergy-free bakeries face comes from the processing equipment.
“It’s really hard to offer this type of alternative to schools or grocery stores unless you can really automate, focus on one product, one shape, because it’s just really expensive,” Patti said.
Local school districts can be a viable distribution option, yet there’s been a significant shift away from schools allowing baked goods and other foods in classrooms, with many introducing ‘no exceptions’ policies. However, some school districts are open to working with local bakeries.
“We don’t work with the schools, per se,” Alyssa of The Difference Baker said. “But all of the local schools around here allow our products in there. I think it’s because we’re certified.”
With the limitations that come with creating allergy-free foods, product innovation can easily turn monotonous. Gluten-free food producers often stick to what they know people want: direct alternatives to gluten-based offerings.
But that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. At Mariposa, Patti continuously innovates the bakery’s menu to go above and beyond what people expect from gluten-free menus. The team holds product meetings every Wednesday where they discuss what to craft next with customer feedback at the forefront.
With more than 20 million Americans diagnosed with food-related allergies, the allergy-free baked goods category has a lot of room to grow. While running a successful operation isn’t exactly a piece of cake, retail bakeries can find favor with their customers by incorporating allergy-friendly offerings into their bakery cases.
