Baking & Snack - September 2006 - 41

other bun bakeries, it has been adapted to
handle the company's unique soft and sticky
doughs. The company prefers piston-style dividers instead of rotary systems. "Our dough
is much softer than regular bun or roll doughs,"
Mr. Nelson said. "These machines were customized to
handle our dough styles."
The divider's 6-across K-head piston assembly pushes
the dough into the cut-off wires. The pieces drop to the
rounding table and the forward action of the table's belt
forces them against the long plastic bars, turning them
into small round balls.
The dough balls pass under an automatic flour duster
then down the zig-zag board, a series of gates that aligns
them to fall accurately into the cups of the AMF Accupan
bun system's intermediate proofer. At the discharge station of the bun system, dough balls drop down into an
indexing mechanism that delivers the pieces into the baking pans, four balls per cavity. Pans reach the bun systems'
discharge station via a Capway conveyor. They travel the
"short" way to the proofer to maximize the load. The indexing setup for the 12-packs is similar.
"Line operators weigh the dough balls every 15 minutes," Mr. Nelson said. "We have operators at the discharge station to provide a visual check of the dough, and
they make sure that four pieces are deposited in every
pan pocket."
A PanelView touch screen terminal hanging above the
rounder table provides current information about operating conditions and speeds up changeovers between varieties and sizes. "The computer has 'recipes' for setting up
the machines for the different doughs, including our new
whole-wheat products," Mr. Nelson said. "In the old plant,
we were completely manual on set up and changeovers."
The proofer rises the equivalent of three stories, and pans
enter at waist level, travel up one spiral, cross over to the second spiral and ride down to leave the proofer, again at waist
level. The proofer was designed with special gates that will
open to dump excess heat in case of a breakdown.
Out of the proofer, the pans move along to an infeed
grouper at the front of the Pulver Genau 70-ft, indirect,
gas-fired oven. Rolls bake, traveling through two zones.
The indirect oven is equipped with turbulence blowers
to maintain even heat throughout the zones. Like oven
temperature, blower speed is also controlled by the computer. The bread oven employs the same technology but
is longer at 100 ft.
The oven operator monitors the proofer, too, checking
temperature and humidity every half hour. He also verifies that the dough is rising to the proper height.
Buns exit the oven and are removed from their pans
by a Capway depanner. The depanner operator takes the
internal temperature of the buns every hour. These measurements - like those taken at other QC check points

46 / BAKING & SNACK / September 2006

ᮡ Robotic palletizing systems load cases onto slave boards, which carry RFID tags
to enable tracking through the high-rise freezer and into distribution operations.
- are recorded on a chart with grids showing high- and
low-limit targets. Pans move back to the makeup room
but first pass through a Newsmith bun pan cleaner that
uses air and brushes to remove any lingering crumbs.
PAN MANAGEMENT. The high output rate at the new
bakery, and a desire to reduce manual labor, led King's
Hawaiian to select a Capway Robocap pan management
system for its bun pans. Located on a mezzanine platform between the proofer and the oven, the pan system
stacks, stores and unstacks pans as required by the production schedule.
A crane-style arm picks up the pans and moves them
back and forth to the load/unload conveyor. An electric
eye station monitors the pan recycling conveyor to verify
that the correct pan is passing below. At present, permanent baking pans are used only for buns. The company
prefers to bake its 16-oz round bread in 9-in. aluminum
foil pie pans - a unique presentation that became the
company's signature early on. There is room in the pan
management system for loaf pans should King's Hawaiian decide to add sliced bread to its product line.
The permanent pans for 4-pack and 12-pack buns are
different. The 4-pack pan is configured with 18 square
chambers (set 3 by 6) that receive four dough balls each.
The 12-pack pan is designed with six shallow rectangular
indentations (set 2 by 3) to carry ovenable paperboard
trays that get 12 dough balls each. Pans are reglazed three
times a year. When running the 12-pack, a Kliklok carton erector sets up the paperboard trays and sends them
to an AMF robotic pick-and-place system that transfers
them onto the pans. This replaces the manual labor formerly employed to load the cartons onto the baking pans.
The 4-pack pans are lightly sprayed with release oil before they receive the dough balls; the paperboard for the
12-pack cartons features a release coating.
"In many ways, the bread line is a mirror image of the
bun line," Mr. Nelson said. It runs 100 loaves per minute
for 1 million loaves per week.
Bread makeup also starts with receiving the dough
from the upstairs mixing room. Bulk dough travels down
the transfer conveyors to a large hopper above a Kaak
(formerly Benier) ram-and-shear divider that outputs

Baking & Snack - September 2006

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