Modern Baker is set to roll out its new Superloaf – a high-tech bread product that supports normal immune function while providing fewer calories than traditional wrapped bread. Here are 10 facts about the loaf.

We are, however, careful to ensure that our passion doesn’t get the better of us when explaining why we think that sourdough bread is so great.”​ The salt level should be no more than 1% and ideally at or below 0.85%, in line with the UK Government’s salt reduction targets for bread. The company was launched in 2021 by Erik Fabian and Jennifer Yoko Olson with a shared vision of a world where people gather daily to share homemade sourdough bread and other fermented foods. Your gut microbiome is a complex community of microbes that live in your gut. Spector describes it as a thriving city, in which the inhabitants come and go over time. The bugs that live in the gut have been found to influence the overall health of an immune system. The healthier the gut microbiome, the healthier the immune system. Modern Baker’s potential partners going forward are food manufacturers and businesses that can “see beyond HFSS” to a point where “food nutrition starts to become the currency”, he added.One of the key roles of vegetables in our diet is as a source of health-boosting fibre, a key component of Superloaf. What distinguishes it from other breads, however – even the multi-seed, wholegrain ones – is that it includes a spectrum of fibres. Other loaves generally include insoluble fibre (often wheat bran) which is useful in helping to keep things moving in the gut. At the end of 2022 Silicon Valley started to break down the Food Tech investment asset class into its component parts. ‘Food-as-med’ was one of them, recognising the commercial potency in science and tech based solutions aimed at solving the chronic metabolic health crisis facing society.”

The business aims to make a positive impact on one billion diets by 2028, with Sharp stating that the development of bread was “ just the beginning​” for the team. SUPERLOAF is currently sold in-store by Marks & Spencer and online by Ocado. Dubbed “the healthiest loaf ever made” and geared towards supporting immune health, the NPD went on to win the Innovation category at Britain’s Best Loaf just a few months later. Modern Baker has partnered with Hovis and Marks & Spencer for the launch of Superloaf 5.0 – a mass produced version of what it previously dubbed the ‘healthiest loaf ever made’. The funding has been earmarked to support the application of this unique method in the formulation of other UPFs such as breakfast cereals, pasta, ready meals, yoghurts and pastries. Sharp felt the best way to fully recover was to eat unrefined, plant-based foods. After making sourdoughs that friends seemed to love, she set up (with Lindsay Stark, a graduate of the School of Artisan Food in Nottingham) a healthy bakery-café in Oxford producing long-fermented sourdough breads from unrefined stone-ground grains.Receiving our sixth grant in a row from Innovate UK is tremendously encouraging, and a brilliant validation of Alt-Nutrition staples that benefit digestive and gut health, potentially ushering in a new era of mass-produced foods that are nutritious and have a net positive impact on wellbeing and the planet,” said Sharp. We’re not claiming Superloaf is as healthy as a vegetable,” Campbell said. “But we’ll get there. Superloaf is already fantastic, and it’ll get better and better. There’ll be constant upgrades.” Furthermore, it has been adapted for mass production, resulting in a nutrient-dense loaf which is accessible in terms of both price and sensory factors – in particular, loaf volume and crumb softness – so it resembles the 8m sliced and wrapped loaves bought daily by bread-loving Brits, but with greater depth of flavour. Contains valuable soluble fibre that is known to improve blood sugar control as well as providing the specific prebiotic fibre that feeds the billions of microbes/bugs in our gut that are important to our immunity.

Receiving our sixth grant in a row from Innovate UK is tremendously encouraging, and a brilliant validation of Alt-Nutrition staples that benefit digestive and gut health, potentially ushering in a new era of mass-produced foods that are nutritious and have a net positive impact on wellbeing and the planet.”​

Campbell said one of the biggest challenges was to ensure the loaf would be highly scalable so it could be used outside the artisanal market and in the industrial sector.

Modern Baker takes a “health-plus” approach, Campbell noted, meaning its development is more about the ingredients added in and what benefits they offer as opposed to a “health-minus” approach of taking ingredients out. As such, Campbell explained the business had to “step out of the HFSS, traffic light and Eat Well plate structure because it doesn’t savour better nutrition”. Modern Baker collects data and stores it. We review our retention periods for personal information on a regular basis. We will hold your personal information on our systems for as long as is necessary for the relevant activity, or as long as is set out in any relevant contract you hold with us.The company forged a partnership with M&S in 2022 following media coverage of the beta-version of Superloaf. The team at food-as-medicine startup Modern Baker have launched their latest product, SUPERLOAF, in support of their target to make a positive impact on one billion diets by 2028. Superloaf inventor Melissa Sharp and Modern Baker co-founder Leo Campbell first launched the product in 2021 following six years of research and development. This had been focussed on two key areas: replicating the nutrient profile found in a fruit, veg and whole grain diet from natural plant sources, and developing the processes required to integrate it into processed foods.