Milling & Baking News - April 21, 2020 - 14

Business

777,408

March 22-28

March 15-21

March 29-April 4

March
8-14

March
15-21

140,542

128,317

63,955

10,349

444,397

376,865

169,229

62,323

How to make
banana bread

1,168,975

(across all recipes in Chicory's network)

How to make your
own sourdough starter

85,786

Petracca, chief operating officer and cofounder of Chicory. "Playing a comforting role in our lives during these unstable
times, basic bread and its infinite variations are staple pantry items that offer a
sense of normalcy. Homemade and hearty
recipes always see a surge during cold, flu
and allergy seasons, and we're seeing the
same pattern now as people look for ways
to self-soothe. What's unusual is that this
also fits into an emerging trend of basic
and scratch recipes as people look to build
their cooking and baking skills from the
ground up. Bread serves so many purposes, and these recipes offer exactly what
people are looking for right now."
According to the Home Baking Association, the seeds of this surge of family
flour demand were evident before the
coronavirus outbreak. Research conducted in October 2019 by Mintel for the HBA
indicated strong interest in home baking
from millennials. Only 8% of this generation "never bake," and 44% do so at least
once a week with 11% (included in the
larger figure) saying they bake daily.
The HBA's website, homebaking.org,
has enjoyed a nice bump in traffic, up

13,627

of thousands of consumers are, at a minimum, putting a toe in the water and have
begun exploring serious home baking.
From the first week of March, views
of basic homemade bread recipes surged
355%, to 896,215 for the period of March
22-28. By the first week of April, the figure had slipped to 660,756 views, but the
views were still more than triple the levels at the start of March. Even more dramatic was a surge in views of recipes for
homemade tortillas, peaking in March at
786,395, up 1,590% from a week earlier.
The surge was most powerful for perhaps the most ambitious home bakers
- those viewing directions for how to
make sourdough starter. Still rising in the
week ended April 4, the number of views
hit 140,542, up 1,258% from only 10,349 at
the start of March. Chicory said that the
starter directions leapt from the 543rd most
viewed recipe in its network to No. 9.
Chicory attributed some part of the
surge in recipe searches to a natural consequence of panic purchases leading many
consumers to "need to come up with ways
to use up everything that's packing their
pantry." Difficulty finding packaged bread

March
8-14

March
15-21

March
22-28

191,595

Homemade
tortillas

Milling & Baking News

March 29April 4

Engagement in sourdough
bread recipes views

Source: Chicory

14 / April 21, 2020

March
22-28

173,872

Basic homemade
bread

March 8-14

(across all banana bread recipes in Chicory's network)

Source: Chicory

439,487

786,395
46,539

660,756

896,215

197,474

874,334

Engagement in top baking recipes views

Engagement in banana
bread recipes views
1,045,897

also may have contributed to a desire to
"bulk up their basic cooking and baking
skills in order to self-sustain."
Also contributing to the decision to
bake is the large number of consumers
officing from home, Chicory said.
"People have more time, particularly
those who are out of work or working
from home and can monitor their bread
for a perfect rise," the company said.
Chicory, which offers a "Get Ingredients" button on 1,350 recipe websites,
including Betty Crocker, helps food companies place ads on websites just as they
are composing shopping lists.
"Bread has become the food and recipe
of choice for most Americans," said Joey

570,491

NEW YORK - Together with toilet paper, dried beans and sliced bread, family
flour has seen an extraordinary spike of
sales since the beginning of March. The
surge has forced flour millers to scramble
to keep up with orders.
The sudden affinity for family flour
also has prompted flour millers and others to wonder whether the 2-, 5-, 10- and
even 25-lb bags of newly purchased flour
will inspire a surge of home baking or
will end up on the back of pantry shelves
gathering dust.
While demand for family flour has
been declining for years, decades even,
data gathered by Chicory, a New Yorkbased tech firm, suggest that hundreds

112% over the past week, said Charlene
Patton, executive director.
The group's current president, Courtney
Gaine, who also is president of The Sugar
Association, said exchanges about baking
and recipe sharing on social media have
more than doubled in recent weeks and
surged 600% over the holiday weekend.
"We're seeing an uptick in desire to
learn as well as resourcefulness," she
said. "Traffic to our 'Types of Sugar' page
has increased, and searches for how to
make your own powdered and brown

314,350

What are consumers doing
with all that family flour?

March 29April 4

Source: Chicory

sugar have tripled over the past month."
Sharon Davis, program director at the
HBA, said the association's website and
social media staff have affirmed that
home bakers have been elevating their
craft beyond the usual cookies, cupcakes,
brownies and mug muffins.
"They're tackling essential daily staples - loaf bread, tortillas, homemade
pizza and always popular banana bread,"
she said. "Along with our baking bridge
goals for career and tech connections,
our alliance with family and consumer
sciences partners reports they're assigning 'adulting 101' tasks while in distance
learning to encourage hands-on food
preparation, meal-time conversations
and home cleaning to build student's essential life skills that save finances and
also build healthful practices." MBN
bakingbusiness.com / world-grain.com
http://www.homebaking.org http://www.bakingbusiness.com http://www.world-grain.com
Milling & Baking News - April 21, 2020

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