The bakery recently made several changes to reduce the ergonomic stress on its packaging staff. For example, the pallet loading station sits in a shallow pit. The operator engages a foot pedal to raise or lower the position of the pallet to a comfortable work position.
"We use exit interviews to figure out what people don't like about their work here," Rob Spica said. "That's how we've eliminated much of the twisting, bending and lifting actions that are so damaging."
A fork lift operator takes loaded and stabilized pallets away to the storage freezer. Seven docks accommodate outgoing product.
"We operate a bakery-within-a-bakery here," Fred Spica said. "While we do 24,000 pieces per hour on the Gouet line, we have another Adamatic line for dinner rolls that is also capable of peak output of 24,000 pieces per hour. And we run a bread line and a bagel line here as well."
The Bun Basket needs this capacity to satisfy ever-changing customer needs.
"The rack ovens give us the flexibility to produce in relatively small quantities," Fred Spica said. "And there are a number of products, such as our big ryc loaves, that we'd rather do in the rack ovens."
The bakery is willing to tailor products
to customer requests. "Our order-size
limit varies, of course, with the customer," Fred Spica said. "Naturally, if a
long-standing customer wants something special, we'll be glad to do it even at relatively low volumes. But we do operate as a business and will say no when necessary."
IDEAS AND ACTION. "If it's dough, it's 'do-able' at The Bun Basket." The bakery lives by its motto.
There are a lot of bakeries out there," Rob Spica said. "Every baker uses similar processes, and customers can get baked foods anywhere."
"What makes us unique," continued Fred Spica, "is our service."
While The Bun Basket can rightfully brag about its high 99.8% fill rate for orders, the brothers add another dimension to service: the ability to work alongside customers on product development.
"We're able to take an idea all the way through the development process," Fred Spica said, "through processing and packaging to the finished product.
"Some products have taken as much as two years in development, but three to sil months is more typical," he continued. to days." "The shortest one took us just
"There's no big R&D department here," Rob Spica added. "If a customer wants a solution, we can usually turn around an idea for evaluation the next day. That’s gotten us into more doors than anything else."
This work requires interaction with the customer's R&D personnel. "We'll work with the product to make it bigger, denser, crisper, sharper flavored or whatever the customer wants,” Fred Spica said. Often we go through several iterations to meet the need. Other bakers might get frustrated with this committee-style process. It requires a lot of patience, but this approach has been fruitful for us."
Now, with automation handling these tasks, The Bun Basket reduced its labor costs dramatically and cut its workers compensation rates, too. No labor, other than supervision, is needed from dough makeup through depanning. The system is operated by an Allen-Bradley PLC, with PanelView 600 display, housed in a stainless steel control panel.
The new system employs height instead of length. Its two oven chambers equal an 80-ft tunnel oven in output capacity. Design of the system eliminated any draft effect: the entry door and exit door are never open at the same time.
Products move through the system on baking pans, or trays, mounted on stainless steel carriers. Chain-driven elevators and pushers act on the stabilized frame of the carrier, not the tray, thus keeping the system "quiet." Once loaded, dough pieces - even breadsticks - stay put.
The carriers that move products through the proofer and oven are only a few inches apart, so the size of the heated chamber is proportionally smaller than conventional ovens. The cubic volume heated is roughly 75% less than a typical hearth tunnel oven. Products can be baked at lower temperatures in less time, with more moisture retention than conventional ovens.
STRAIGHT LINE FLOW. Under the direction of plant manager Walt Grzybowski, raw materials and supplies flow through the bakery in a straight line as they turn into finished, par-baked and frozen bread and rolls. The bakery makes its doughs in a variety of spiral and wendel mixers. Bulk flour, held in an enclosed room, combines with computer-portioned minor dry ingredients as it enters mixer bowls along with automatically metered water and liquids. Hand scaling has been eliminated as much as possible.
The operator wheels mixer bowls to the dough hoist feeding the Adamatic automatic roll makeup system. The hopper releases dough into the multi-pocket divider and drum rounder. After a short intermediate proof, dough pieces pass through the moulder for final shaping. A retracting belt transfers finished dough pieces onto a conveyor. The makeup line outputs up to 24,000 pieces, or 7,000 lb of dough, per hour.
Reaching the proofer infeed, dough pieces pass through a second retracting conveyor that loads them onto a tray-and-carrier assembly. The carrier moves off into the proofer. Carriers follow an up-and-down path through proofer chambers. They leave the proofer at the top of the system and descend past a wide window. Any manual slits would be added here.
Entering the oven at the bottom position, carriers take products up through the first chamber. Pushers move the carriers to the second oven chamber where they descend before leaving the oven..
Carriers rise into the depanning station where a sweep arm, edged with a brush, sends rolls on to cooling and packaging.
"Every 17 seconds we're moving a carrier," Rob Spica said.
