Imagine a bread roll much like Subway’s Italian white bread: soft, fluffy, carbohydrate-dense. Now imagine if that bread had zero grams of sugar, 12 grams of protein, and only 1 net carbohydrate per serving.
That’s the product that California-based startup Hero Bread recently launched in Subway sandwich restaurants. The company’s foundational tech is a flour alternative developed in founder and CEO Cole Glass’ home kitchen. Earlier this week, I got on the phone with Glass to find out how he created his flour replacer—and tasted Hero Bread’s Italian roll myself.
Due to a rare and severe set of food allergies, Glass eats an extremely limited diet: no raw fruits, vegetables, or nuts. “My diet has been terrible for my whole life because I can only have protein, fat, and carbs. As a kid, it was great that I could ask for a cookie or bag of chips instead of eating carrots and celery sticks,” Glass told me. But as he grew older, he became more aware of the health problems that his diet could provoke.
Glass wanted a way to eat the carbohydrate-dense foods he enjoyed, but to reduce their health impacts. Yet, most of the alternative flour products on grocery store shelves were made from almond, coconut, or cauliflower (all foods he couldn’t eat).
“I had three options,” Glass said. “I could give up flour-based foods forever. I could go back to eating like a five-year-old and literally eat myself to death. Or, for lack of a better term, I could try and science the shit out of the problem, and reinvent flour from the ground up with a set of ingredients I wasn’t allergic to.”
So, though he didn’t have a culinary background, Glass started baking. And after two years of experimentation, he figured out how to use different combinations of isolated proteins and fibers (from common crops like corn, potatoes, wheat, and flax) as the bases for various baked goods.
Glass cold-emailed Mattson, a food laboratory in the San Francisco Bay Area, to see what they made of his alternative flour. After they ran some tests and confirmed that he was onto something, he contacted potential investors.
“I’d show up at their offices with a Lululemon bag full of muffins, cookies, and waffles, and a pitch deck on my computer,” Glass said. Silicon Valley VC firm Great Point Ventures became Hero Bread’s first investor, with partner emeritus Ray Lane joining the board of directors. A former CEO of McDonald’s also became an early investor.
Glass also attracted advisors and investors who were involved with alternative meat startups Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods. Drawing on their experience, the company decided to launch its first product in partnership with a quick-service restaurant chain. The team started up conversations with potential launch partners, gauging their needs—and found that those conversations kept coming back to bread.
“Bread is the first thing that you think of when you think about something that is super carb-y,” Glass said, “and it’s the most universal platform for us to jump off of.”
As a quick-service chain that sells huge quantities of bread, Subway was an ideal partner. Hero Bread’s Italian rolls were introduced in five U.S. cities (about 300 total restaurant locations) this month, where they’ll be available through January.
When I tried out the Hero Bread roll in my own kitchen, I was surprised at how convincing it looked and felt. It has a thin, golden-brown crust and a super-soft, porous inside. It also has that airy texture of Subway sandwich bread: When you bite into it, your teeth almost melt through it. Toasted, it gets a nice crunch.
The Hero Bread roll smells and tastes similar to the Subway analogue, with the addition of an unfamiliar-but-nice, nutty note, which might come from the milled flaxseed. Overall, I suspect you could serve it in place of a standard-issue sub roll, and no one would be the wiser.
After the limited-time test launch, Glass hopes to expand Hero Bread’s partnership with Subway. The company will also pursue other commercial partnerships in the future and eventually consider direct-to-consumer distribution.
“I wake up every single day feeling some combination of shock, humility, and gratitude that Hero Bread became a company, because I started out just making muffins in my kitchen,” Glass said. But with the startup now up and running, he envisions expanding into “virtually every category you can imagine using flour for. Imagine creating things that look, taste, smell, and feel just like the quote-unquote normal versions—while eliminating net carbs, increasing protein and fiber, and reducing calories.”
