Baking&Snack - March 2017 - 96

COOKIE TECH

Making an oldie but goodie
Since its inception in 1991, Bud's Best Cookies, Birmingham, AL, has
pushed the limits on cookie technology. Back then, owner Bud Cason
pioneered the mini-cookie market. "I thought, 'if I would make bitesized cookies, they wouldn't have to be picked up and packaged by
hand," he recalled. "They could go automatically into a VFFS [vertical
form/fill/seal] bagging machine and be cartoned. The first person who
touched the product would be the person who opens the bag and
takes cookies out."
Throughout the years, automation spread from processing to
packaging, where his company installed the latest in high-speed baggers, automatic case erectors and robotic pick-and-place systems.
Most recently, Bud's Best put in a sugar wafer line. Making traditional
strawberry, vanilla and chocolate wafers is something he always
wanted to do ever since seeing an automated production line at a
European trade show in Germany in the late 1980s.
Using a little ingenuity, the bakery reinforced a section of the building
to move paperboard and other storage materials to a mezzanine level
and free up floor space. That allowed Mr. Cason to install the new Haas
compact wafer line in what he called "a building within a building."
Making sugar wafers is pretty simple. A Hobart 150-qt mixer combines flour, sugar, shortening and flavor. He compared making the thin
wafers as similar to using a "glorified waffle maker."
However, he's learned two important things. "You have to keep the
equipment clean," he said. "It has to be spotless from one shift to another. And, you need to keep the room air-conditioned [around 60
to 65°F]."
Recently inducted into the Baking Hall of Fame, Mr. Cason described
his lifelong journey in the cookie industry as just going in another
direction. "I'm still learning about how to do things better," he said.

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

coatings to handle the sticky gluten-free
dough structures," he said.

Keeping it all-inclusive
Maintaining the integrity of larger nuts, chocolate chips and other inclusions provides a
premium point of differentiation. "We have
seen an increased interest from bakers to develop healthy cookies with large inclusions
where they want the size of those inclusions to
remain intact during the extrusion and forming process and be visible in the finish product," noted Cesar Zelaya, bakery sales and
technology manager, Handtmann Inc.
He pointed out that the company's vane
cell technology gently handles inclusions and
particulates in cookie dough. Handtmann also
developed the FS-520 multilane forming system for 3D shapes such as spheres, cylinders
and ovals. It operates a servo motor rotating a
multiple-plate system. The FS-520 can also be
equipped to produce co-extruded treats.
Consumers continue to demand upscale cookies with a homemade appearance. Reading offers slab lines that produce
frozen square-shaped cookie dough pieces.
According to Mr. Pallottini, the system sheets
the cookie dough to give it a uniform thickness, then cuts it into slabs and again into
squares before freezing. "The consumer then
bakes the square cookies at home," he ex-

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