To develop sustainable approaches to improve grain quality and help end users of soft wheat to mitigate challenges in downstream processing

Users of soft wheat have identified variation in quality to be a major root cause of challenges encountered in downstream processing. These challenges are currently managed reactively, and are exacerbated by a fundamental lack of understanding in terms of defining the principal quality characteristics of soft wheat for a given process.

This project will address this challenge by identifying desirable quality characteristics, developing analytical tests to allow screening of soft wheat lines, and finally testing the stability of these characteristics in the context of variation according to growing environment and year. This will enable a new pipeline of quality soft wheat varieties in the UK, less reliance on wheat imports, and a reduction in downtime and use of processing aids in downstream manufacturing.