OpenBread – Pao-Wow – Vive le Pain !

OpenBread – Pao-Wow – Vive le Pain ! is exploring systems, mapping factors impacting behaviors and proposing scenarios taking “bread/pao/roti” as a trigger for shaping the next in Food, Hospitality and much more.

The topic of “Bread” , one of the oldest foodstuff made by humans for humans, has many forms and formats, offering a wide range of texture and taste, aroma and appearance. Culturally loaded, bread offers a touch point into situated narratives, opening up to stories close to heart and hands-on. Today’s bread has a diverse range of manifestations, appropriations and expectations. Innovation and Design have been driving these for 14000+ years for flatbread and 4000 years for leavened … For a long, it was contextually crafted.

And then came a.o. the “modern sliced bread”. Did the slicing contribute to disconnect from the place and kill Food Literacy? What are the co-creation approaches we can explore in order to restore and/or expand Food Literacy? What are the roles of Smell, Sound, Touch, … in sensing and tasting Food, hence helping the experience and the literacy dimensions?

14000+ years of human experience and innovation in bread is the temporal context OpenBread is anchoring the design process in.

Bread is an entry point into Food Systems, and as an everyday vehicle for many, it allows to explore relations and interactions between stakeholders, while using it as a case for Food Literacy.

OpenBread was softly launched in Mumbai, at Studio Sugar & Space, in dialogue with the participants of coCreationcamp Mumbai 2026. Breaking freshly baked pav [ and adding some extra fresh butter to have maska pav ] and sipping garam chai – great moments to trigger the conversations. The quest continues in Brussels and Antwerp, at Edible Confluence Food + Design. The voyage continues from Kolkata to Mumbai, from Chandigarh to Amritsar, from Chennai to Puducherry, from Bengaluru to Mysore to Kochi …

Each coCreationcamp session is looking into some dimensions where Bread triggers questions and propositions related to food literacy, to behavior, to culture, to regeneration, and much more.