Two batches of oat flour can look identical, feel the same and come from the same raw material. In the bakery, though, they can produce completely different results. With support from  Lantmännen Research Foundation, researcher Simon Ballance at the Norwegian food research institute Nofima, working closely with Vaasan Oy in Finland, has set out to understand why.

Simon Ballance is a researcher at Nofima, Norway's equivalent of the Swedish research institute RISE, where he works on food chemistry and the relationship between raw material, processing and end product. Oats have become his specialty, both for their nutritional benefits and because it's a crop that thrives further north in Scandinavia than wheat can.

– I think the main driver for me is that oats are nutritionally attractive, and that we should eat more of them. But it's quite clear that oats behave very differently from wheat during processing, and also once you start baking, which creates quite a few interesting research questions, says Simon Ballance.

I think the main driver for me is that oats are nutritionally attractive, and that we should eat more of them. But it's quite clear that oats behave very differently from wheat during processing, and also once you start baking, which creates quite a few interesting research questions.

/ Simon Ballance

Researcher at Nofima

/ Simon Ballance

Researcher at Nofima

Invisible differences, real consequences
Whole grain oat flour, may appear quite similar if you just compare it visually or examine it by hand. But in industrial bread production, the differences show up fast in how much water a recipe needs, how the dough behaves and how even the final result is.. For a bakery aiming to deliver consistent products, the variation in quality is a real problem.

– They may appear quite similar if you just look at them or , but they behave extremely different during industrial bread production. That makes it very difficult for the bakery to know how much water to add and how to optimise the recipe to get consistent quality, Simon explains.

The problem is most obvious when bread is baked using oat flour alone, with no wheat flour added. Without wheat's gluten there's nothing to even out oat flour's quirks.

Two projects, one goal
Bread made from 100% oat flour is a growing trend in Finland, where bakeries such as Vaasan Oy outside Helsinki already produce it. The bakery has become a hub for the research, which is split into two linked projects, both funded by Lantmännen Research Foundation. The first, OatBake, was completed last year, while the ongoing OatBakeAdvance builds on the same research question.

In the first project, the researchers collected oat flour from mills across Europe and had Vaasan Oy bake and score the results, based on its own expertise. In parallel, Nofima analysed the flours across more than fifty physical and chemical properties, to see which ones correlated with good baking results. The results were promising enough for the researchers to move forward with a follow-up project.

In the current project, the work is being repeated with more samples, partly to confirm that the correlations hold up, and partly to dig deeper into what happens already at the mill, before the flour even reaches the bakery.

From a specialist bakery to an open market
Today, only a handful of bakeries with long experience, Vaasan Oy among them, are able to bake bread with consistent quality using 100% oat flour. If the researchers can pinpoint which properties of the flour actually determine baking performance, it becomes possible to make a standardised milling process. This would open up the market so other bakeries can buy oat flour and have a consistent product to work with, rather than something only one specialist bakery can handle.

That could, in turn, make oat flour a more popular ingredient, open the door to new types of products, and help meet growing demand for gluten-free alternatives.

Where research meets industry
Simon Ballance points to what he sees as the real strength of the project: the close collaboration between research scientists and the food industry.

– The bakery in Finland has experts who could give a proper quality scoring to the bread that closely aligns with consumer preference, and I don't think that's been possible in the past, If research is going to be useful for industry, it needs this kind of close collaboration. It doesn't happen overnight – you have to build trust between yourself and the company you're working with. That's something we've built with Lantmännen over many years, says Simon.

With that trust in place, Simon Ballance and his colleagues hope the knowledge will eventually translate into something concrete: some kind of actionable quality control, whether at the mill or at the bakery, that makes it possible to know in advance how a batch of oat flour will perform, before the dough is even mixed.

October 2026