What is enriched and fortified flour? Is it good for you? Jess and Nita from Happy Healthy Eaters explain the important role of enrichment and fortification of wheat flour for babies, children and adults.

What is enriched or fortified flour? You may have seen ‘enriched all-purpose flour’ or ‘fortified wheat flour’ listed on your favourite baked goods. But what does it mean?

First, it’s important to understand how flour is made.

Flour is milled from the seeds or kernels of the wheat plant. Each kernel is made of three parts: bran, germ and endosperm.

Once wheat arrives at the mill, the kernels must be cleaned and prepared for milling. Next, the wheat kernels are conditioned, which means they are softened with water before they are fed into the mill to be ground or milled into smaller pieces. Once milled, the ground material is sifted to separate each part of the kernel – the bran, germ and endosperm.

To make all-purpose flour, the outer coating of the kernel, the bran, is removed  as well as most of the germ, which is the embryo of the seed.

Vitamins and minerals are added back into the flour to replace those that were lost when removing the bran and germ.

Fortification occurs when additional nutrients, like folic acid are added to the flour. Folic acid fortification in wheat flour has resulted in significantly lower instances of birth defects in babies.

The process of enriching refined flour with key vitamins and minerals like iron, thiamine, niacin, riboflavin and folic acid helps prevent nutrient deficiencies and improves the nutrient quality of food for Canadians.

The amount and type of vitamins and minerals that are required to be added is determined by Health Canada for public health benefits.

It’s important to know that not all flours are required to be enriched and fortified, so check labels carefully.

Want to learn more about flour? Visit the Milling or Enrichment & Fortification pages