New OSU wheat varieties could lead to more natural bread with fewer additives
Thursday, June 26, 2025
Media Contact: Alisa Gore | Office of Communications & Marketing, OSU Agriculture | 405-744-7115 | alisa.gore@okstate.edu
Do you ever feel frustrated when you look at the ingredient list on a loaf of bread because you don’t know what most of the ingredients are?
What if a bread product contained fewer ingredients?
A new trio of Oklahoma State University wheat varieties might just be the food solution for consumers interested in fewer additives — the substances added to food products during processing to help improve color, texture, flavor, or, in the case of bread, dough quality.
The use of the food additive called vital wheat gluten has increased over the past 20 years, making up 2%-20% of bread’s flour weight, depending on the product. Gluten additives are used in bread to improve the dough strength because the bread’s natural gluten is not enough to create strong, flexible bread products.
Brett Carver, regents professor and wheat genetics chair in the OSU Department of Plant and Soil Sciences, and his wheat breeding team began working with a naturally occurring genetic protein called Bx7oe in 2012. Bx7oe is an overexpressed protein, meaning cells produce larger amounts than what would normally be produced. The Colorado State University variety Snowmass that contained the gene was bred with the OSU wheat variety Gallagher, and the three varieties resulting from the match had a shocking effect.
“The value comes from having a certain level of dough strength that did not previously exist in hard red winter wheat,” Carver said. “Dough strength and extensibility are important in making bread, but sometimes, strength and extensibility clash with each other, and extensibility is more common than high dough strength in modern-day varieties.”
Flour from the OSU varieties Paradox, Breadbox and Firebox (dubbed the OX varieties) appears to provide an uncommonly high level of dough strength while maintaining varying levels of extensibility.
OSU has partnered with Oklahoma-based Shawnee Milling Company and Farm Strategy, a food supply chain consultant, to research the potential of these three wheat varieties as a natural flour-based alternative to wheat gluten additives, such as vital wheat gluten.
“The work the OSU Wheat Improvement Team did a decade ago is now the foundation for building a system where the farmer will be trusted to solve a bread problem,” said Andrew Hoelscher, president of Farm Strategy.
Carver and Hoelscher hope the flour from the three OX wheat varieties will one day replace most or all of the wheat gluten additives in bread.
“The OSU wheat breeding program is emphasizing something other than yield without sacrificing yield. We are adding value to a crop that farmers are struggling to make money from with just high yield alone,” Carver said. “There’s an opportunity for everyone producing, transporting and using the grain to gain value from this wheat.”
Due to the increased value of the OX wheat, producers who grow and sell it would receive a higher price for their crops, and milling companies could market their products with added value. The benefit for consumers would be bread with cleaner and fewer ingredients.
When OX wheat was first produced in 2023, it generated more than $300,000 in revenue for the state of Oklahoma. While the financial returns are promising, OX wheat is not on the commercial market yet.
Farm Strategy bridges the gap between OSU’s wheat breeding program, wheat producers and milling and baking companies by partnering with wheat producers to grow the OX wheat, supplying grain to mills, and by teaming up with Shawnee Milling to create products using a flour combination that includes flour made from the OX wheat varieties. Through these partnerships, Farm Strategy is assessing the value of wheat in the food system.
“Once we know the value of these genetics, it becomes a question of how we partner with the players in the market to navigate the supply chain to get these food solutions into the hands of consumers, and at the same time, share the economic benefits with every player,” Hoelscher said. “Our job is to help food companies rethink a food solution and communicate the value of these wheat genetics for all the parties involved while guiding us to a cleaner label for consumers.”
However, there are hurdles to overcome in reducing bread additives.
“We think there is some extreme value to be had with this flour; we just don’t know what that is yet. We are still working to figure out how to maximize the potential of this wheat in a commercial setting,” said Caleb Winsett, vice president of procurement for Shawnee Milling.
As Carver said, “The baking industry is not used to using wheat flour to solve a wheat flour problem.” It’s a new strategy that will take time to figure out.
Meanwhile, research on the Paradox wheat variety and its siblings continues through the combined efforts of OSU and Kansas State University.
“There’s a paradox in how we got the dough strength from the Gallagher background, and we cannot explain it just based on the gluten protein we introduced. Something in the Gallagher background interacts with this gluten protein to make the gluten synergy explode. That’s the research going on behind the scenes,” Carver said. “The breeding hasn’t stopped. We found what we never thought we’d find. Now, we want to hold on to this unique quality but ramp up the yield.”
Carver said the next step in his team’s research is to unravel the paradox by identifying the genetic mechanisms responsible for the OX wheats’ gluten strength.
“Without this knowledge, we are unable to execute a more strategic breeding program for new OX varieties with higher yields,” Carver said.
Once it is operational, the planned OSU Agronomy Discovery Center and its greenhouse complex and laboratory could allow these types of discoveries to be made sooner and allow breeding to occur at a faster rate. OSU Agriculture recently launched the Agronomy Discovery Center fundraising initiative to upgrade OSU’s existing Agronomy Research Station to include a new headhouse, 12 research greenhouses and a multipurpose Research and Education Center.