Baking&Snack - March 2017 - 46

RISE BAKING CO.

Left: At South Coast,
all frozen products
are hand-cased for
quality control.
Right: The packaging
area combines
manual labor with
automation.
Ryan Alcantara

also the quality standards the company held its product to - the plant is GFSI-certified under IFS, and the
Irvine facility has an R&D center onsite, both with bakers and food scientists on staff - and its ability to crank
out millions of frozen cookie pucks every day.
"Kent helped give us scale that I could bring back to my
national sales team," Mr. Schultz said.
Fragmented as it might be, in-store bakery is seeing
cookie growth, perhaps because cookies are becoming increasingly easier to produce. South Coast makes
in-store cookie production user-friendly through its
proprietary FastPan technology, which Mr. Hayden developed himself. "FastPan allows retailers the ability to
execute the baking process in two motions for the pan,"
Mr. Hayden said of the sheets, which adhere themselves
to the cookies during the freezing process and then release during the bake.
"In the cookie industry, this is one of the most innovative technologies we've seen in the past decade," Mr.
Schultz suggested. "We've been able to capture quite a bit
of market share much quicker than we'd have historically
been able to do in such a mature market."
With FastPan use, cookies are preplaced directly on
the baking sheet during production, and their adherence
to the sheet allows in-store bakery operators to move
cookies directly from the box into the oven. "Instead of
placing 24 cookies one at a time, the worker just places
two sheets," Mr. Hayden explained. "The labor savings
is phenomenal. It has really opened the door to retailers
who want to bake fresh cookies but control labor."
At South Coast's Springdale plant, the quality standards are visibly apparent. "There's an element of trust,"

46 Baking & Snack March 2017 / www.bakingandsnack.com

Mr. Ahlgren said. "When you walk this facility, you can
see why customers say, 'This is a place I can trust to do
the right thing.' "

'Khaki' brownfield
In January 2014, South Coast took possession of the
105,000-sq-ft facility, a former warehouse, in Springdale.
The fact that it was a shuttered warehouse meant that
this brownfield site was an open canvas for the new
building, which is more than twice the size of the Irvine
location.
Unlike a greenfield project, where a baker starts completely from scratch, or a traditional brownfield site,
which can be limiting, the Springdale site was more like
a "light" brownfield - khaki, if you will - because it
not only was an empty shell with zero infrastructure, but
it also came with an empty 4-acre neighboring lot, providing room for expansion.
After 20 years in Irvine, Mr. Hayden came into this
space with the long view in his sightline. "We made most
of our mistakes at Irvine, so this was our chance for all
those 'redos,' " he said.
"Kent had long-term vision with this site. It can be
easy to cut corners, particularly on space because square
footage is expensive," Mr. Ahlgren said. "But when you
have the right vision, you gain employee welfare, safety
and quality while having enough space to keep things in
a straight line from front to back. And you reap benefits
that don't necessarily show up on an ROI analysis when
you're building a new facility."
Mr. Hayden described it as "taking our medicine up
front." For example, the bakery invested in upgrading

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