CELIACTODAY

The tortilla has finally been tamed. Ravioli is back on the menu. Bread choices abound, pizza is plentiful, and tasty desserts are everywhere. There is even beer in the ’fridge—not one brand, in fact, but several.

Is anything still missing from the gluten-free diet?

“Soft pretzels,” says Paul Kelty, a co-owner of Mr. Ritt’s Gluten-Free Bakery in Philadelphia. “That’s one item no one has done well yet.”

That providers of GF foods are down to mulling soft pretzels says a lot about how much progress they’ve made in satisfying the demand among celiacs for safe replacements for conventional foods.

The number of companies offering GF products has mushroomed in the past few years, and the array of GF offerings has exploded.

Bulging Database

Indeed, in building a searchable database of GF food makers, CeliacToday.com found nearly 110 companies that focus primarily or heavily on people with celiac disease. Combined, they offer over 1,000 GF products.

Some segments of the GF market even seem over-crowded. There are more than 40 companies selling GF baking mixes, for example, and nearly as many sell GF cookies.

“We were quite please for many years to be operating under the radar,” says Jerry Bigam, chairman & CEO of Kinnikinnick Foods Inc. in Edmonton, Alberta in Canada. Now, he says, “dozens of companies are popping up.”

For celiacs, that growth means a wider range of better-tasting food choices. For manufacturers, the growth means greater competition—which has spurred them to focus even harder on serving celiacs.

Kinnikinnick, for example, recently added animal crackers, graham crackers and waffles to its product line. It’s also reworking its hot dog and hamburger buns to make them softer and tastier, and is reformulating its donuts to make them lighter and give them a “nicer texture,” Mr. Bigam says.

Fighting to Be First

Competition also is prompting companies to bring products out faster.

“If you don’t get the product out there, someone else might do it first,” says Steven J. Singer, president of Glutino Food Group, a company in Laval, Quebec, just outside Montreal, Canada.

This year, for example, Glutino has introduced over a dozen new items, including a line of frozen chicken entrées. The company created the items with the competition in mind.

“In many ways, we’re very conscious of what Amy’s is doing,” Mr. Singer says, referring to Amy’s Kitchen Inc., Petaluma, Calif., which also makes frozen GF entrées. “Amy’s is a vegetarian company. So, we did something different” by introducing frozen chicken entrées.

Newer entrants into the market are differentiating themselves by offering products that weren’t widely available, if at all.

I’ll Take a Tortilla

For example, La Tortilla Factory Inc., Santa Rosa, Calif., recently jumped into the GF market by introducing tortillas made from millet and teff, both safe grains. Another company, Conte’s Pasta Inc., Vineland, N.J., has begun selling GF ravioli, stuff shells and pierogis.

Mr. Bigam of Kinnikinnick traces the boom in GF food manufacturing to the Consensus Development Conference on Celiac Disease that the U.S. National Institutes on Health organized in June 2004. That event called national attention to studies indicating that up to 3 million Americans may have celiac disease.

For food makers, that suggested that demand for gluten-free foods might be far greater than they had believed.

Not long after the Consensus Conference, two national companies jumped into the market for the first time. Just a few months later, for example, Whole Foods Market Inc., Austin, Texas, introduced its Gluten-Free Bakehouse line. And last year, Anheuser-Busch Cos., St. Louis, Mo., launched Redbridge, the first nationally available GF beer.

Some food makers are beginning to wonder if the market will grow quickly enough to support all the new entrants, or whether a class business “shake-out” eventually will be inevitable.

Bigger and Fewer?

Glutino’s Mr. Singer, for instance, expects that, five years from now, companies making GF foods will be bigger and fewer. “Some of the smaller guys will be weeded out,” he predicts.

Owners of smaller companies know they will feel pressure. But, they believe that their small-scale and hand-crafted approach yields a level of quality that will give them an edge over items produced and packaged in factory-sized plants.

“I think people will definitely pay for quality,” says Michelle Fuller, owner of Celiac Specialties LLC, Chesterfield, Mich., north of Detroit. “Not everybody likes to eat cheap food.”

And some owners welcome the new arrivals.

“It’s an awesome thing. I like to see it,” says Mr. Kelty of Mr. Ritt’s Bakery. “I’m not seeing any decrease in my business as a result of it.”

Why Reinvent?

In fact, Mr. Ritt’s Bakery aims to serve its customers more effectively by finding what it considers to be the best products in each category for them. “If somebody’s doing a good job,” he says, “why should we reinvent it?” (Mr. Kelty also has some favorite bakeries.)

While he says it’s inevitable that corporations will “swallow up” some competitors, Mr. Kelty says one aspect of the business will never change.

“A lot of us vendors tend to be on a first-name basis with each other, and with the (support) group leaders,” Mr. Kelty says. “There’s a lot of ‘family’ in this, if you will. That’s one of the things that makes this worthwhile. And I think that’ll still be there in five years.”

This story originally appeared in the (October, 2007 ) issue of CeliacToday.com. It was most recently updated in (July, 2008).