Sara Lee to clarify label on bread baked in Hastings, Bellevue
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By staff and wire reports
Food company Sara Lee Corp. has agreed to clarify labeling on the amount of whole grain contained in its prizewinning, best-selling Soft & Smooth Made with Whole Grain White Bread, which is baked at plants in Hastings and Bellevue.
The Downers Grove, Ill.-based company and food-labeling advocacy group, Center for Science in Public Interest, reached an agreement on the labels this week.
The advocacy group claimed that Sara Lee’s label on the Soft & Smooth bread was misleading because the product is made mostly from refined white flour.
Sara Lee says labels will now reflect that the bread is made up of 30 percent whole grains, instead of reading “whole grain goodness.”
Sara Lee spokeswoman Ashley Lacroix said the company was surprised and disappointed that the Center for Science in the Public Interest had expressed an intention to file a lawsuit about its packaging and marketing practices.
She said Sara Lee Soft & Smooth Made with Whole Grain White Bread was designed and marketed as a “transitional bread” – a product with the flavor and texture of white bread that provides white bread-loving consumers with more whole grains than they would otherwise receive in their traditional white bread.
Its contents were already listed accurately on the label before the agreement with the advocacy group.
Many of the revisions were already completed or under consideration by Sara Lee, Lacroix said.
“We are proud of the 10 grams of whole grains per serving this transitional bread offers our consumers,” she said.
It remains the best-selling commercially-baked bread in the nation, according to Sara Lee.
The brand was among Business Week’s best products of 2005, when it was introduced and had become a best-seller.
Business Week said: "OK, so it's just a tad more tan than white bread, but it has the same texture and taste. And it smooshes the same way, an important factor for passing the kid test. The difference? Made with a blend of refined white flour and a new white, whole-wheat flour from ConAgra Foods, this $2 loaf has the whole grain and fiber that old-fashioned white breads lack."
Seeing Sara Lee's success with Soft & Smooth, other companies also have introduced whole grain hybrid breads.
Sara Lee also bakes other varieties of Soft and Smooth bread, including 100% Whole Wheat.
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