Finished Frozen Bakery Products And Their Complex Thermal Journey
Efficiency in bakery manufacturing is often discussed in terms of line speed, downtime, changeovers, giveaway and Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). While OEE offers an important high-level measure of the performance, it is only as useful as the data behind it. In our experience, working with frozen product bakery manufacturers, there is often a missing layer of more granular information that can help identify key areas of performance loss.
Finished frozen bakery products undergo a complex thermal journey: they are baked, cooled, frozen for storage and distribution, then thawed or baked from frozen before consumption. Gathering detailed temperature data at the point where the process actually happens – in the oven, in the freezer or the cold store for example - can help manufacturers pinpoint the causes and locations of performance losses.
For industrial bakeries producing thousands of products an hour, small variations in cooking, cooling or freezing can add up to significant cost. For example, a product may be spending longer in an oven than necessary, cooling more slowly than expected, being frozen under conditions that affect quality, or requiring additional cooking time further down the supply chain. Without detailed process data, it can be difficult to understand exactly where those losses are occurring.
This is where temperature measurement and building up a thermal profile of a particular product plays an important role and increasing bakeries are looking at this, not just to evaluate effectiveness, but also to use as part of their BRC reporting.
Ovens, freezers or cold stores have different operating ranges so often these stages in the process are monitored in isolation. But if an oven is set to 200°C, that does not tell the manufacturers how quickly the centre of a particular product reaches the required temperature; equally, a freezer might be set at -20°C, but that does not tell us how quickly the product itself freezes. Taking a ‘holistic’ view of a product’s production journey and measuring each of the stages provides a much more complete picture.
This is one of the interesting opportunities created by miniature temperature data loggers capable of operating across a very wide temperature range. Signatrol’s dLog SL63T, for example, measures from -40°C to +125°C with an accuracy of ±0.2°C. That means a single logger can potentially follow a product through the full thermal journey, from the initial cooking process, through freezing and cold storage, and ultimately through the final reheating or cooking process.
The significance is not simply that the logger can withstand a wide range of temperatures. It means bakery manufacturers can collect comparable – and, importantly, inviolate data - from different stages of the process using the same measurement technology.
Certainly, over the next five years we will see bakery manufacturers looking for analytics is to deliver on a more granular level and it is certainly a step that we are advocating with clients. It is important for bakery manufacturers get into a different mindset; this is not about collecting more data for the sake of it. It is important to collect the right data at the point where a process actually happens and then use that information to replace assumptions with clear, inviolate evidence. This will be the way for bakers to maximise the capacity and performance of existing equipment, reduce waste and energy consumption as well as ensuring product quality.
For more information visit www.signatrol.com
