Bakery plant improvements made to optimize water, energy, yield, asset utilization and waste can have an enormous impact on your bottom line

The current economic climate is driving bakery manufacturers to find new sources of cost savings. In order to minimize expenses, often, manufacturers optimize product formulations, implement efficient equipment and train employees to look for cost containing alternatives. Beyond these measures, there are significant opportunities to increase efficiencies in fresh and frozen bakery operations. Finding new process-based sources of cost savings provides commercial bakeries with an opportunity to increase profits and achieve sustainability goals.

Cargill Process Optimizers (CPO) can recommend improvements for common bakery challenges such as energy minimization and yield improvement with modeling tools.

Stated simply, commercial bakery processes are fairly similar despite differences in scale and product format. In most bakeries, dry ingredients are mixed and wet ingredients are blended-in to form the dough that is cooked, cooled and packaged. The cooking forms are typically cleaned for re-use and the mixing vessels and transfer lines are cleaned between batches. This similarity allows Cargill Process Optimizers (CPO) to recommend improvements for common bakery challenges such as energy minimization and yield improvement with modeling tools.

Impact areas for process optimization modeling tools include:

• Energy
• Water
• Yield
• Asset Utilization
• Waste
• Sustainability

CPO’s modeling tools provide an accurate target for final product mass and estimation of avoidable losses. For many loss points, once they have been identified, they can be easily eliminated. For others, CPO uses statistical analysis to understand which factors are most likely to cause product loss. In facilities that make multiple products, losses may be driven by different factors – dough temperature and proofing time or production run length and batch size. Armed with this understanding of loss drivers, operating teams can significantly reduce waste.

As rising energy rates impact bakers' profitability, there is perhaps no better way to reduce operating costs than to investigate some facility-based solutions. Great starting points include: assuring that piping is insulated and to review chilled-water requirements for processes to ensure that water temperatures are no lower than needed.   At a deeper analytical level, CPO uses process models to perform heat integration analyses – finding cost efficient ways to match hot streams that are cooled or wasted with areas that are heated. CPO has helped several plants with electricity reductions through the optimization of refrigeration systems by pre-cooling product upstream of a spiral freezer or in optimizing cooling in the dough mixer. Utility bills will provide easy energy savings tracking.  

CPO has also been successful in developing Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) models of the air flow patterns inside spiral freezers. This knowledge can provide energy savings through understanding the impact of air temperature, product transit speed and modification of equipment layout to reduce ingress air.

Another key challenge faced by many bakeries is accurately calculating and then maximizing, the overall process yield – the mass of raw materials that are sold as final product. While relatively simple in concept, accurate yield calculations are complicated by a number of factors:

• What percent of water added to the dough during mixing is evaporated for baked products
• Proofing the dough converts some sugars and starches in flour to CO₂, which leads to a mass loss
• Multiple processes lead to recycles of dough
• Process disturbances can lead to waste production

Waste can be found in bakeries in many areas: time, energy, water, ingredients, packaging, scaling, scrap, and trash. In the baking industry, the one area that receives the most attention is scrap — process waste or damaged product — as it's the area most easily tied to cost.

From a sustainability perspective, reduced consumption of energy is easily converted to reduced emissions.  Saving energy not only reduces costs, but improves a company's standing in the community, the baking industry and the market.

Streamlining operations and trimming costs are great ways to improve your bottom line. Whether you need to squeeze more capacity from existing assets or tackle sustainability goals, CPO's top-down approach can deliver pragmatic, actionable solutions.