Improving bakery process efficiency
IN a 2020 report, State of the Baking Industry, we learned that bakery products is a growth sector within food manufacturing and that one of the most significant trends is the “changing palate of the consumer”. The average spending on bakery products per household is expected to increase this year. Most of this spending will be on bread, with the second-most being cakes and cupcakes.
Health-conscious consumers are moving to “artisan” breads made from ancient and whole grains, all natural ingredients and no added preservatives.
In Food Industry Executive, when asked “What bakery trends do you think will arise in the next 10 years?”: “We’ll see a continued trend toward more natural bread. Twenty years ago, the trend was to process faster and faster. Now, it’s reversing so that bakers are doing it more like their fathers and grandfathers were 40 or 50 years ago.”
These market forces are causing industrial bakers to have to adjust their products and as a result adapt their manufacturing operations and logistics to compete.
This adaptation creates a host of issues for bakery process efficiency. Among these issues are the obvious macro-impacts of removing preservatives, which means that products need to reliably get from the baker to the consumer in shorter time frames and usually more frequently and in smaller batch sizes.
This means that production runs may have to be smaller and more frequent, with changeovers occurring more frequently. This can be devastating to bakery profit margins if not managed well. “Agile” is a word from the technology industry that bakers are going to need to embrace.
There are also a range of smaller, but still significant issues that impact bakery process efficiency.
Artisan products often mean soft doughs with high hydration, long dough resting time, use of sourdoughs, and little or no baking improvers.
Processing soft doughs can be a challenge because they tend to be stickier and thus are harder to process over various modules of a makeup line.
As the demands of consumers evolve, bakers will have to evolve with them, while maintaining profitability. This has profound implications for bakery process efficiency.
How can industrial bakers respond and improve bakery process efficiency?
Baking is largely about well baking!
The demand for ovens and proofers is strong, outpacing gross domestic product growth, with an annual CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 7% projected from 2019 to 2025. Part of this strong growth is because baking is an energy intensive process. Ovens are at the heart of every baking process and ovens consume massive amounts of energy, meaning that they are a large component of the baking industry cost structure. Replacing older ovens with newer types that are more energy efficient is a costreduction strategy. However, the change in demand towards other types of breads also drives this demand as well, as some oven technologies adapt better to products like artisan breads, which require a unique crust and interior texture.
As noted above, baking consumes a lot of energy which is costly.
In a super interesting study on Industrial Oven Improvement for Energy Reduction and Enhanced Process Performance, the researchers speak to the necessary balance between baking process efficiency and product quality.
Producing product rejects not only wastes the raw materials and labour that went into the product, it also wastes the energy used, which without careful accounting can be a significant hidden cost.
In this article, they propose an oven optimisation methodology which resulted in an 87,5% reduction in cooling time for baked goods, which saved 202 hours of annual oven downtime per year and a reduction in oven gas consumption of 20-30%.
Beyond optimising baking oven efficiency and the packaging line, what else can bakers do to improve bakery process efficiency? We recommend a three phase approach: Embrace lean manufacturing
Improve planning and documentation Institute benchmarking
Learn to test and optimise
Lean manufacturing
Lean manufacturing is a proven methodology
to reduce waste and increase process efficiency. Below are several resources
which recommend implementing a lean manufacturing process or that demonstrate the results that can be achieved for bakery process efficiency using lean methods.
Planning and documentation General tips by researchers have reviewed some useful steps including embracing lean manufacturing techniques such as just in time inventory management. They recommend having a well documented production process for each product that includes an ingredients plan for each production run. You cannot only compare total production costs against planned production costs, you can also calculate actual yield vs planned yield for each set of ingredients.
Measuring actual vs planned production and bakery product yield is an ideal application for smart factory analytics technology like Worxmity’s.
There’s also an interesting observation about overproduction which is unique to the baking industry.