July 29, 2012 - 3:45pm
A surprising find
In the process of doing some searches relating to bread this past week, I encountered several recipes from a site named www.igaalliance.com. In refining my search somewhat, I learned that the site would not display any information if I tried to visit the site by directly entering the address (or subaddresses). However, if I used the search term "bread" and told Google to limit the search to the domain www.igaalliance.com, it would return a number of pdf links. Each pdf is a separate recipe, presumably for use by IGA member stores. None of the documents I viewed had any statements about copyright or proprietary information.
Whether there are recipes for things other than breads, I don't know. I haven't looked into that.
Paul
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Weird.
Strange what you can turn up on the web! The Google site search on the IGA website worked for me too. I didn't find any claims of copyright, etc. either, but most of the recipes have something like "Source: Modern Baking. Volume 16, Number 9. August 2002" at the bottom of the .pdf. They look to have been scanned from several paper sources. Some of the other bits looked interesting too - I only looked at the "Consumer Attitudes" study, but it does give a peek into the world of retail grocers!
Search engines can do interesting things to weakly secured servers connected to the Internet. I once accessed a list of wages, training, and promotions for all the employees of a hospital, for the past several years, through a search engine access point.
IGA had some fine breads, with really secret recipes, this would be a gold mine :-)
Here is a very interesting page
http://www.igaalliance.com/Institute/IGAInstitute/english/tabs.asp?sectionsid=12-114&tabsid=12
Allmost all of the formulas posted on their site are either from a magazine called Modern Baking (an Industry based magazine) or from the archives of the Retail Bakers.
I have seen and used many of these over the years.
I wonder if these are actual production formulas for IGA or prototypes for testing?
Carlton Brooks CCE CEPC
my take is that they are production recipes for IGA stores to use in their bakery. The other possibility (note the IGAInstitute segment of the URL) is that IGA may run an in-house training program to which member stores can send their bakers.
Keep in mind that I don't have any clue what the real case may be.
Some of the recipes look fairly decent. They don't seem to rely on the kinds of additives that many of the more "industrial" baked goods contain.
Paul