Baking & Snack - February 2015 - 56

FLOWERS FOODS

20-oz open-top bread at 185 loaves per
minute. It uses heat reclaimed from the
oven exhaust, with auxiliary heat capacity
available. This style and size of bread bakes
in 22 minutes in the continuous conveyor
oven with its 917 ft of active travel. Both
feature a spiral-in-spiral design that ensures even heat exposure for all loaves.
A steam tunnel at the oven entrance is
turned on according to product need. Both
the proofer and oven feature low entry /
low exit configuration, making it easy to
visually inspect products and to service
the systems. "From a control standpoint,
the proofer and oven are one system," Mr.
Benton said.
A Burford splitter-seeder system is
placed between the proofer and oven.
Wide-way travel is maintained as the
proofer and oven hand off pans, transferring them from individual grid carriers to
conveyors. The same orientation is kept as
pans pass through the Stewart Systems depanner-delidder. "You see this kind of depanner orientation in Europe, but it is not
common in the US," Mr. Benton noted.
Sensors inspect the empty bread pans
before they return to the makeup area. If
a loaf sticks in a pan or the sensors detect
other debris, that pan is shunted aside

and taken out of service.
Still grouped together in sixes, the hot
loaves proceed to the enclosed heat-andhumidity-controlled bread cooler. The
spiral-in-spiral system can move two hundred 20-oz loaves per minute along its 2,464
ft of active travel in 55 minutes. The bread
cooler features a 4-in.-thick stainless steel
enclosure and is Flowers' answer to delivering bread to the wrappers in uniform,
consistent condition 365 days per year regardless of ambient temperature inside or
outside the bakery.
"Controlling the cooling process results
in better quality consistency," Mr. Benton
said. "We knew that the Northeastern climate would have a wider range of temperature changes. In the Southeast, ambient
temperature varies between 60 and 95°F;
here, it's 0 to 100°F."

Flexing the line
Leaving the bread cooler, loaves encounter
the bakery's first right-angle turn. Loaves
now travel one-by-one into packaging
operations, passing through a Fortress
Technology metal detector. The integrated
system uses horizontal switches to feed four
bagging lines, each consisting of an AMF
bread slicer ahead of an AMF bagger. A

Learning and stretching
Keeping up with technology is a way of life at Flowers Foods. The manufacturing and operations support team constantly evaluates what's
new, searching for what can be put to work profitably at its bakeries.
"We go to industry shows to gather new ideas, said Robert Benton,
"
senior vice-president and chief manufacturing officer, Flowers Foods,
"and we also sit down frequently with vendors, new and current, to
challenge them to present their best ideas. After all, we're bakers, not
design engineers. We need their input and interaction.
"Every project generates new ideas for the next one, he continued.
"
Sometimes, the new idea emerges from older approaches. That
prompted the company to consider the AMF/BakeTech MaxiSaver bread
cooler. "We saw an enclosed bread cooler at Warburtons in England a
number of years ago, Mr. Benton noted. "It reminded me of the old
"
method of cooling bread with rack coolers, but the old system was high
maintenance and generated a lot of scrap. We took the good from the
old system and used modern technology to achieve better results.
"
The AMF Servotech is another example. It uses ram-and-shear dividing methods but is fully capable of matching the speed of any competing modern bread divider.
"Wrapping is the next area of improvement, he said.
"

Baking & Snack - February 2015

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