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to Mr. Miller. “We did this to reduce noise for our neighbors,” he said. Bulk ingredients — flour, sugar, salt, oil and cream yeast — go directly from delivery vehicles to their designated storage silos, bins and hoppers while nonbulk ingredients come in on skids to be held in a 3-tier rack system. Some liquids arrive in bulk totes. Three types of wheat flour are currently used at Hamilton: two varieties of white and one wholewheat. On its way to the mixer, flour passes through one of two sifters in the silo room. MIX AND BAKE. Seven horizontal mixers manage preparation of the bakery’s straight doughs. Three mix bread doughs while two handle bun doughs. An additional mixer is on standby. Bread dough discharges from the mixers and is pumped onto conveyors that deliver it to two rotary bread dividers, while bun doughs are portioned on two rotary bun dividers. The rounded dough balls to be made into bread loaves rest on horizontal belts as they travel to the bakery’s three sheetermoulders. Portioned bun doughs enter an intermediate proofer and makeup system. Pans, held in an automated storage-and-retrieval system and fed into the production lines by stacker/ unstacker units, move into place ahead of the makeup sections. An indexer positions the 6-strap bread pans for entry into the targetedspray pan oiler. The strapped pans travel through the system with their wide edge forward, a technique that maximizes capacity output but advantageously slows belt speed. The conveyors carrying pans filled with dough pieces move through openings in the wall from the makeup area to the room housing the proofers and ovens. Bread doughs rest and rise inside a traystyle proofer before they enter the single-lap, direct-fired tunnel oven. Buns bake in the second oven, also using single-lap design. A depanner removes loaves from pans and sends them along to the spiral conveyor where they cool prior to slicing. Operators check products against established specs at a quality assurance station next to the depanner. Another Capway depanner handles buns. The packaging room, like the makeup area, is environmentally controlled and enclosed. The plant stores packaging supplies in a tiered rack immediately outside the packaging room and separate from raw ingredients. Sliced and bagged, finished products are automatically placed in basket-style delivery trays. The filled trays move on conveyors through openings between the packaging room and the distribution staging area. Here, seven bottom-up basket stackers assemble the filled delivery trays into stacks. Operators pull the finished stack off the line, place a tag identifying variety and pull date on the stack, and move it to the order assembly area. Transport trailers backed up to 16 dock doors stand ready to receive the finished baked goods. Everything made at Hamilton leaves the plant in tractor-trailers for ▼ A high-tech control room manages all operations in the bakery. Screen readouts show current operating conditions, handle troubleshooting and monitor raw material supplies.

▲ Round-top pan bread accounts for more than 70% of the output on the new bread line in the Hamilton bakery.
CNW GROUP/MAPLE LEAF FOODS

A large on-site engineering shop supports ongoing installation activities as well as routine preventive maintenance. A separate staging area allows construction and assembly of new equipment. FROM SILO TO SHIP. Breads and buns baked at the plant take just 2½ hours from mixing to distribution staging, and finished products reach store shelves no more than 48 hours later. The bakery’s computer-integrated ingredient system supplies bulk, major and minor ingredients to the mixers. Canada Bread installed its bulk silos indoors to mitigate the effects of seasonal temperatures and humidity changes. Load cells constantly monitor contents of all silos. The silo room’s walls feature explosion panels, an important safety measure. “This system is designed to prevent flour from escaping, but safety is important to us because flour dust is known to be explosive,” Mr. Miller said. Flour-recovery systems in the makeup areas minimize flour dust in the plant. A pneumatic unloading system supplies the bakery’s eight flour silos and one salt silo. A 10th silo position is reserved for future use. The bulk truck receiving center is fully enclosed against the weather, an unusual choice for bakeries, according

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Baking&Snack - November 2011

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