Baking & Snack - September 2014 - 99

EQUIPMENT
Data Loggers

RECORD and VERIFY
If your bakery doesn't already own a thermally hardened data logger,
it will soon. Here's what you need to know.
by Laurie Gorton

So, how does a baker prove the oven to be a preventable control point as defined by pending Food Safety
Modernization Act (FSMA) rules? Today's commercial
baking ovens already come equipped with computers
governing temperature settings, but more monitoring
- and documenting - will need to be done. Not just
once, but repeatedly.
"It's important to remember that the panel temperature is for control of the oven. It is not telling you what
the product is actually seeing," said Richard Starke, director, Reading Thermal, Sinking Spring, PA.
Speaking as an oven manufacturer, Jerry Barnes,
vice-president, engineering, Baker Thermal Solutions,
Clayton, NC, confirmed this matter by saying, "Just
measuring the air temperature doesn't give you all the
information you need."
Performance criteria are about to force bakers into a
higher order of data collection. "A single data point is
not enough," said Ray Pearce, baking product manager,
ECD BakeWATCH, Milwaukie, OR. The kill step that
constitutes the preventable control stipulated by FSMA
involves duration as well as temperature. "Multiple
temperature sensors spread across the breadth or
height of the oven [are needed to] ensure that all products meet the food safety spec," he explained.
Where you take the process' temperature makes
a big difference. "Many commercial bakers still only
measure a dough exit temperature," Mr. Pearce observed. "That's just a snapshot. A snapshot does not tell

them when arrival nor yeast kill occurred. In-transit The data logger sits directly
on the oven belt with probes
time/temperature profiling is the solution."
inserted into cookie interiors
to chart both the baking enviDifferent configurations
Today's ovens use proportional-integral-derivative ronment and internal product
conditions.
(PID) loops with set-point limits. These feedback sys- Reading Thermal
tems are designed to minimize temperature overs and
unders by adjusting the oven's energy inputs.
Measurements are taken by thermocouples and sensors mounted throughout the oven, along its walls and
in its crown. "But they're never right at product level,"
Mr. Starke observed. Because data loggers are designed
to stand in for products by traveling the same path at the
same level, they "help the baker understand exactly what
the products are experiencing," he added, noting that
temperature differentials could run as much as 100 F°.
Mr. Pearce explained, "The location of burner control thermocouples is typically not near enough to
where the products travel to accurately represent the
temperatures the baked goods are subjected to. Oven
temperatures [as read from control panels] do not tell
you the internal dough or baked good temperatures."
Data loggers, such ECD's M.O.L.E. and Reading
Thermal's Scorpion systems, measure more than one
data point and record process parameters such as temperature against time traveled through a process.
The Scorpion Data Logging System measures the
four key baking parameters, Mr. Starke explained.
"First, there's the temperature of the environment, which

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