More and more bakers are using honey in their bakery food formulas because of the ingredient’s many benefits, which span from flavor to functional to marketing. Simply put, honey tastes great, delivers many functional benefits to bakery foods and appeals to consumers looking for indulgent, sweet products with clean labels and natural ingredients.

Honey’s popularity in the industry was recently exhibited in a wholesale bakery usage survey conducted by the National Honey Board, which asked bakers why they use honey.

• Flavor/sweetening (48%)
• All natural sweetener (29%)
• Consumer appeal (29%)
• Labeling, market segmentation requirement (19%)
• Humectancy/moisture retention (16%)

For bakers looking to replace their existing sweetener with honey, there are a few processing considerations. Honey’s sugars are precursors to the Maillard reaction, which means that they provide natural color and browning to the finished product. As a result, bakers should reduce the oven temperature by up to 25°F to prevent over-browning. When using honey, bakers also often have to reduce the liquid to accommodate for honey’s average moisture content of about 17%.

For more information on using honey, go to http://www.bakingwithhoney.com/work-bench/