Challenges and Opportunities in Wheat Flour, Pasta, Bread, and Bakery Product Production Chains: A Systematic Review of Innovations and Improvement Strategies to Increase Sustainability, Productivity, and Product Quality

Alessio Cappelli and Enrico Cini
Additional contact information
Alessio Cappelli: Department of Agriculture, Food, Environment and Forestry (DAGRI), University of Florence, Piazzale delle Cascine 16, 50144 Florence, Italy
Enrico Cini: Department of Agriculture, Food, Environment and Forestry (DAGRI), University of Florence, Piazzale delle Cascine 16, 50144 Florence, Italy

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 5, 1-16

Abstract: Pasta, bread, and bakery products are considered worldwide as essential foods for human nutrition. In particular, ancient wheats and whole wheat flours, despite being able to provide health benefits via bioactive compounds, present significant technological problems related to poorer dough rheological properties and final product characteristics. Moreover, both the food industry and consumers are increasingly sensitive to environmental impacts, highlighting the urgent need for sustainable innovations and improvement strategies, from cradle to grave, for the entire production chains, thus motivating this review. The aim of this review is to provide technological innovations and improvement strategies to increase the sustainability, productivity, and quality of flours, pasta, bread, and bakery products. This review is focused on the main operations of the production chains (i.e., wheat cultivation, wheat milling, dough processing, and, finally, the manufacturing of pasta, bread, and bakery products). To achieve this goal, the use of life-cycle assessment (LCA) analysis proved to be an effective tool that can be used, from early stages, for the development of eco-friendly improvement strategies. The correct management of the wheat cultivation stage was found to be essential since it represents the most impacting phase for the environment. Successively, particular attention needs to be paid to the milling process, the kneading phase, to breadmaking, and, finally, to the manufacturing of pasta. In this review, several specifically developed solutions for these essential phases were suggested. In conclusion, despite further investigations being necessary, this review provided several innovations and improvement strategies, using an approach “from cradle to grave”, able to increase the sustainability, productivity, and final quality of flour, semolina, pasta, bread, and bakery products.

Keywords: optimization of wheat cultivation; wheat milling; dough kneading; bread baking; life-cycle assessment; environmental sustainability; innovations in agriculture; sustainable food productions; breadmaking; circular economy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/5/2608/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/5/2608/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:5:p:2608-:d:508281

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().