Baking & Snack - October 2016 - 26

ADVANCES IN TECHNOLOGY

proving the consistency and quality. Those are harder
to pinpoint when it comes to ROI, so we may also look
at increasing the speed of our line or our capacity when
automating."
But automating the process to reduce labor doesn't
necessarily involve reducing headcount, especially in
an environment where the workforce skills gap makes
it so difficult to find and retain trained and skilled operations and maintenance personnel.
In fact, it's quite the opposite in many ways, according to Mr. Mulloy. "It's not so much to reduce labor but
to move people elsewhere in the plant," he explained.
"Because of turnover, it's not easy to find people who
want to work in a bakery. We're still a 24-hour-a-day,
Over the years, the baking industry has made quantum leaps in the automation
of authentic artisan breads and rolls.

seven-day-a-week business. So we're trying to shuffle
the deck by taking the labor from one area and filtering
it to others because the hiring process is not easy."

Addressing additional challenges
Overall, the industry has done a good job streamlining
production and processing, but for many manufacturers,
packaging still remains a vast frontier for improvement
- mainly because of the proliferation in packaging formats now requested by an increasingly diverse array of
retail and foodservice customers.
As Mr. Mulloy noted, "The entire bakery is straight
until you get packaging. Once you get on the other side
of the spiral coolers, it looks like Chicago's interstate because packaging is a 'Chutes and Ladders' game. We've
got bulk-pack, we've got six-pack, we've got some pennypack - and a lot of that is just for one type of product."
Innovation in packaging was one of the many initiatives to broaden in scope at this year's IBIE. Several
Innovation Showcase submissions reflected this change,
including systems that can handle a wider amount of
products more gently and others that offered a more
compact footprint.
"The trend toward packaging flexibility and customization is becoming increasingly important for the
baking industry," noted Joe Turano, president, Turano
Baking Co., Berwyn, IL, and vice-chairman of the IBIE
committee, prior to the show. "It was a small gap that
we analyzed in the planning sessions, and we made an
effort to really try to attract further exhibitor coverage
with packaging equipment."
According to Baking & Snack's 2016 Equipment Trends
survey, the top goals for equipment purchases included
increasing capacity for new products (28%), increasing production speed/capacity (20%), decreasing labor
costs (20%), improving product quality and consistency
(18%) and greater capacity for new products (18%). The
percentages were greater than 100% because the survey
allowed multiple responses. (For more information, see
Page 21 in the February issue of Baking & Snack.)
Many participants in the Innovation Showcase addressed these concerns with energy-efficient equipment,
higher-speed production of artisan baked goods and more
rapid and greater pre-hydration of doughs during the mixing process. Real-time data management - vital to improving yield, increasing product consistency and monitoring the performance of equipment - took a quantum leap.
Such advances in data gathering and analysis provide more
effective tools for operators to react - and sometimes anticipate - a problem on a production line.
In the end, as the saying goes, imagination plus innovation results in realization. That's what bakers saw at
IBIE's Innovation Showcase.

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Baking & Snack - October 2016

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