After the appearance of durum wheat, and then of the bread wheat, the products made from emmer and einkorn (and later also from spelt) have always been more expensive, without having any decisive advantages.

Nonetheless, these minor varieties of wheat have remained important due to their ability to grow in soil or climate conditions where the more productive modern varieties of wheat fail.

So they were frequently used as "backup" crops, for the cases when bad weather or pests destroyed the main wheat crops.

As said in the parent article, they may become again more important where soil has been made worse by modern agricultural practices.