Baking & Snack - August 2007 - 66

PROCESSING TECHNOLOGY

Icing on the

CAKE

To help
bakers meet the
demand for more upscale cakes,
equipment vendors develop
automated decorating lines that
add value to products.
BY SHANE WHITAKER
ecorated cakes today feature a more upscale,
gourmet look as opposed to being the standard
inexpensive iced cake.
"The biggest thing happening in the cake
business is value added, and bakers trying to increase the
value-added quality of new cakes," said Stewart Macpherson, vice-president, sales and marketing, Unifiller
Systems, Inc., Delta, BC. "The North American market
is finally appreciating and prepared to pay more for upscale, fancier cakes. I say finally because Europeans have
been buying high-quality cakes forever. Now Americans
realize that if they tailor it more, they are going to get a
much nicer eating product.
"What this means is that bakers are using better ingredients such as real Belgian chocolate, caramel and fruit
fillings, and chunky toppings are being added on the
cakes," he continued. "Generally, they are increasing the
quality of cakes by adding more to them."
Eric Riggle, vice-president, Rademaker USA, Inc.,
Hudson, OH, said, "For this reason, equipment is geared
toward being able to finish a base iced cake with rosettes,
shell borders, string icing and other specialty toppings
such as roses."

IMPROVING CONSISTENCY. The single biggest benefit
of an automated cake decorating line is consistency, he
noted. "With an automated cake decorating line, you still

have labor, although it's greatly reduced from a totally
manual operation," Mr. Riggle said. "What the end user
benefits from is that they know how much icing is put in
the middle of the cake, how much icing is on top of the
cake and on the sides, and this enables the end user to
know the true cost of a cake."
Reducing labor costs is a major benefit of an automated cake decorating line, Mr. Macpherson said. "It also
minimizes the high training and recruiting costs normally associated with a skilled staff," he observed.
However, Mr. Macpherson noted that bakers often
purchase decorating lines because they want to standardize the product's consistency. "Even in regions or
countries where labor is low cost and plentiful, product consistency is the No. 1 driving factor, and our machines provide consistency in way of portion control and
finished cake consistency," he said.
Mr. Macpherson said he has been in plants installing
cake decorating lines and because the bakery is training
employees to perform this task by hand, it will have racks
and racks of cakes that need to be reworked. "We are able
to dramatically reduce the amount of rework," he said.
Bakeries want to put consistent quality products on
the shelves time after time, according to Matt Zielsdorf,
vice-president, sales, The Peerless Group, Sidney, OH.
Automated lines also reduce injuries to decorators such
as carpal tunnel syndrome and allow better control of

August 2007 / BAKING & SNACK / 69

Baking & Snack - August 2007

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