UK Staple Food Shifts to French, Indian and Mexican Ones

The British bread that donned the role of ubiquitous easy-carry meal to an industrialized world is giving way to a variety of food items like the French croissants, the Indian Chapattis and the Mexican tortillas, according to a recent study. A leading custom research agency, TNS in its latest data reported that the 2009 sales of traditional bread, rolls and baps across all retailers in the UK have fallen by 1.2 percent, while sales of croissants have soared by 33 percent, and tortilla and Chapatti sales have risen by 18 percent.

As per the survey, Indian naans and bagels, the New York favourite have also made notable growth by 13 percent and 11 percent respectively. Andy Simpson, Tesco’s bakery spokesman said "While croissants have been commonplace across the UK since the 1980s, it's naan bread, chapattis, bagels and more recently tortillas that have now established themselves as popular snack alternatives to the traditional sandwich.

Simpson further added that there were so many bread varieties from all around the world now available in the UK and these were drawing sales from traditional loaves, rolls and baps which had reigned supreme in bakeries for hundreds of years. His words are corroborated by the fact that even kuboos, the most preferred bread variety of the Middle East is available in many of the stores in the UK regularly. Besides, the multicultural demographics and consumers’ attitude to experiment with new snacks have also led to the slide in the traditional British food stuff.

The state of the art commercially viable technology present now to produce many oriental bites is also believed to be another reason for them to breach the 250 year old strongly held fortress of traditional British bread basket. Until recently, large scale production of many Indian food items including chapattis and naans were not possible, but today instead of employing manual hours, such production processes are done by machines with relatively less time in making higher quantity.

By Jose Roy