Bakery and pastry
Bake better with Valio bakery solutions
Butter and milk powders are outstanding ingredients for enhancing the flavour and overall eating experience of baked goods. They contribute to desirable texture, help maintain moisture, support even browning, and ensure a consistently high-quality final product. Valio’s dairy ingredients also align with key nutritional and dietary trends, including lactose free and low lactose options, sugar reduction, and protein enrichment. Whether you are creating croissants, pastries, cakes, muffins, or biscuits, Valio offers a wide range of suitable applications and a dedicated team ready to support your development needs.
Nutritional benefits
Rising demand for healthier bakery options
The health and wellness trend is reshaping consumer expectations in the bakery aisle. Many baked goods are seen as convenient snacks, and shoppers now look for options that deliver better nutritional value from reduced sugar and low-carb products to gluten free, lactose free, and protein enriched items. Meeting these needs without compromising taste, texture, or indulgence remains a key challenge for bakery manufacturers.
No more compromising on taste, texture, or nutrition
Valio’s dairy ingredients help you create nutritionally improved baked goods that still taste delicious. Our milk powders and functional solutions support reduced sugar recipes, lactose free formulations, and protein enrichment while maintaining soft textures, rich flavour, and reliable baking performance. With Valio, bakery professionals can meet modern wellness trends without sacrificing the sensory experience consumers expect.
Premium taste and texture
Valio butter performs optimally in bakery applications
In bakery and pastry, nothing matches the flavour or functional performance of real butter. Plant-based oils and margarines cannot deliver the same rich taste, flaky layers, or golden brown finish consumers expect from premium baked goods. For products like puff pastry, croissants, laminated doughs, and shortbread, butter quality profoundly impacts texture, plasticity, aroma, and bite and selecting the right butter is essential for consistent, high-quality results.
Valio butter for exceptional baking performance
Valio butter brings authentic, natural flavour and reliable functionality to every bakery application. Its excellent plasticity makes it ideal for laminated doughs, helping you achieve light, flaky layers in puff pastry and croissants. In shortbread and cookies, its rich taste and contribution to a perfectly crumbly texture elevate the eating experience. Valio butter delivers superior texture, a beautiful golden-brown finish, and clean label appeal all backed by more than 100 years of butter-making expertise.
Clean label
Meeting growing demand for natural, transparent ingredients
Clean label expectations continue to rise as consumers pay closer attention to formulation, ingredient lists, and overall product transparency. Shoppers increasingly prefer baked goods they perceive as safe, natural, and nutritionally valuable, avoiding E-numbers, artificial additives, and complex-sounding ingredients. For bakeries, delivering this level of simplicity while maintaining texture, stability, and shelf appeal can be a significant formulation challenge.
Valio ingredients enable clean label recipes
Valio’s dairy ingredients help you tap into the naturality trend with clean label formulations that still perform beautifully in baking. Our solutions allow you to replace emulsifiers, thickeners, and hydrocolloids with functional dairy-based alternatives, achieving stable texture, appealing structure, and clear ingredient lists free from E-numbers. With Valio, you can create baked goods that align with consumer expectations for purity without compromising quality or processing efficiency.
Functional solutions for bakeries
From nutrition and texture to clean-label appeal, Valio’s dairy ingredients help you create bakery products that meet today’s consumer expectations and perform consistently in production.
High protein
The growing popularity of high protein foods creates new opportunities for bakery products and biscuits that offer both indulgence and added nutritional value. Milk proteins provide an excellent nutrient profile and strong water-binding properties, contributing to appealing texture and product stability.
Valio Eila® MPC 65 enhances high-protein baked goods by:
- Increasing volume in the final product
- Delivering excellent mouthfeel and flavour
- Supporting clean label formulations
- Offering a lactose free milk protein concentrate
Natural colour enhancement
Hydrolysed lactose browns more readily than sucrose or lactose, making Valio Eila® powders a natural way to enhance baked colour. This helps you achieve a desirable golden-brown appearance and crisp crust without additives.
With Valio Eila® powders, you can:
- Accelerate browning for appealing colour and texture
- Potentially reduce baking time by 10–20%
- Maintain consistent results across batches
Gluten-free
Gluten-free baked goods often struggle with poor structure, muted flavour, and limited nutritional value. Valio’s high-quality milk-based ingredients help overcome these challenges, enabling gluten-free products that remain delicious, nutritious, and satisfying.
With Valio’s dairy solutions, gluten-free products are:
- Delicious and gut-friendly
- Rich in nutritional value
- Appealing in taste, texture, and appearance
Sugar reduction
Sugar reduction remains a strong trend in bakery, with consumers increasingly seeking healthier options without compromising enjoyment. Valio’s bakery solutions make it possible to lower sugar content naturally while maintaining softness, moisture, and flavour integrity.
Replacing sugar with Valio Eila® specialty milk powders helps you achieve:
- A golden-brown crust, as hydrolysed lactose browns more readily
- Longer freshness through improved water binding
- Reduced sugar content without artificial sweeteners
Digestive comfort
As awareness of digestive wellness grows, more consumers are choosing lactose free products to support comfort and wellbeing. This rising interest has created a strong demand for bakery items that combine lactose free benefits with great taste and nutrition.
With Valio’s lactose free dairy ingredients, you can create products that are:
- Gut-friendly and easy to digest
- Naturally lactose free without compromising taste
- Rich in nutrition and the good qualities of dairy
Why choose Valio for baking
Unmatched dairy expertise
For more than 120 years, Valio has advanced the science of dairy, building a heritage of innovation backed by over 300 patents and a Nobel Prize. This deep expertise helps you create products with exceptional taste, texture, and functionality.
World-class Finnish milk
Our milk comes from Finland, where strict standards, full traceability, and exceptional purity allow you to build products with true premium value. Our producers work in one of the world’s cleanest environments, ensuring consistently high-quality raw materials.
End-to-end support
We partner with you throughout product development. Our experts offer guidance in formulation, process optimisation, and application testing, helping you create products that perform reliably and meet consumer expectations.
Applications for bakeries
High quality ingredients for bakery and pastry
Valio butter and milk powders are made always from fresh Finnish milk that is ranked among the cleanest in the world. By using high quality, sustainable produced ingredients, you can make premium bakery products with superior taste that meet the consumer requirements.
Premium Valio butter
Fresh Finnish cream and world-class know-how – this is what makes our butter the best in the world, every season.
Specialty milk powders
Label-friendly Valio Eila® ingredients for several applications. Reduced sugar, high-protein, or lactose free. Overcome your product formulation challenges and replace standard fresh milk or powder in recipes.
Milk powders
Valio SMP, WMP, and buttermilk powders. Pure Finnish milk combined with the most modern technology ensures these ingredients are of excellent quality.
Demineralised whey powders
Nutritious, high-quality Valio DEMI™ whey powders are manufactured from fresh whey from our own local cheese plants.
Cheese
Valio cheeses are made of the best natural ingredients and dedication to flavour and quality.
Fruit preparations
The manufacture of fruit and berry fillings, marmalades and jams takes place at Valio’s large, specialised facility at Suonenjoki, Finland.
Create better baked goods with natural ingredients
Discover how Valio’s functional ingredients elevate taste, texture, nutrition, and sustainability. Click through to download the whitepaper and unlock the latest bakery trends and product development insights.
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Interested in further information?
Want to hear more about our business solutions and ingredients? To be connected with Valio Food Solution Sales, fill in the contact form. Our product experts will be happy to help you
