The company has developed an extract of a non-GM, purple grain wheat cultivated in Canada for grains and beans company InfraReady, which adds a natural purple colour to regular flour.
The anthocyanins responsible for purple grain wheat's unusual colour will also significantly boost the bread's health properties, according to Spectrum managing director Kenneth Davis.
"The purple colour gives the bread a novelty factor but we have also found that it has antioxidant activity very close to that of wild blueberries," he told AP-Foodtechnology.com at the Fi-Asia exhibition in Bangkok this week.
"One slice has the equivalent antioxidants of 80g of blueberries."
Spectrum has been marketing purple grain wheat in its multigrain blends for some time but it is now setting up a premix factory in Singapore to produce the purple-coloured bread mix. It is scheduled to start production by the end of the year.
This will allow the product to reach the market more rapidly than if bakeries have to develop their own formulations. It also allows Spectrum to control the product quality, said Davis.
"Antioxidants are booming and you just have to look at the growing market for cranberries and blueberries to see the potential for this product," he added.
Spectrum Ingredients, formed 10 years ago out of ConAgra's Asian ingredients business, is already a leading supplier of bakery ingredients in south-east Asia but the purple bread has attracted interest from even further afield at this week's exhibition.
"We think it's probably a world-first and people are always looking for something new," explained Davis.
