At Falcone's Cookieland where floor space is at a premium, the new IJ WHITE SPIRAL COOLING SYSTEM handles more flatbread in less space than the dozens of mobile racks the bakery used before.
After all, Falcone's Cookieland of Brooklyn, N.Y., bakes its crispy flatbread in paper-thin sheets that cool quickly as they leave the oven But early on, the bakers learned that cooling flatbread involves more than temperature control. There's moisture content to consider, too.
"We get better quality results if we cool the flatbread for an extended period before we wrap it," said Carmine Falcone Jr., general manager of his family's bakery. "That way the product doesn't' sweat' or throw off moisture in the package and, thus, promote mold growth."
When Falcone's started making flatbread more than a decade ago, operators stacked the warm sheets of baked flatbread on edge in small trays. Then they placed the trays on pans, inserted the loaded pans into mobile racks and wheeled the filled racks away to cool. The next step was to pull the rack to the packaging line, manually unload its shelves and pans and fine up the trays of flatbread on the overwrapper's infeed conveyor.
Every transfer risked damage to the fragile flatbread. The dozens of mobile racks took up every available square foot of floor space in the cramped packaging room.
"The truth is that we simply couldn't produce enough flatbread when cooling on racks," Mr. Falcone said. "We ran out of room."
BUSINESS BASE. The story of how Falcone's Cookieland, a family-owned and operated wholesale bakery, became a significant producer of flatbread involves a completely different line of baked foods: cookies.
"My grandfather started our business," Mr. Falcone said of the retail bakery opened by bread baker Angelo Falcone in 1945.
When Angelo Falcone's two sons, Angelo Falcone and Carmine Falcone, took over the business, they expanded it to five retail locations around Brooklyn. production plant: a wholesale cookie bakery less that a mile away. It was being sold by a family that had decided to go out of the baking business.
To offer their customers a full assortment of baked foods - bread,cakes, donuts and cookies - the brothers pooled production making cookies at one location, bread at another. In 1983, however,
"Retail baking can be very demanding," Carmine Falcone Jr. said of the family business that he joined first as a dishwasher, then donut fryer and driver. Today he manages sales, representing the bakery to retail grocery, supermarket and wholesale customers. His cousin John Falcone and his brother-in-law Eddie Vacarro also joined the family business.
"We had spread ourselves very thin to manage the retail bakeries," he continued. "It didn't give us enough time for our families."
Italian specialty cookies, popular products at the company's retail shops, launched the new wholesale bakery. Falcone's established its place in bakery wholesaling by making high-quality, yet value-priced, private-label specialty cookies.
Soon after going wholesale, Falcone's located an ideal production plant: a wholesale cookie bakery less than a mile away. It was being sold by a family that had decided to go out of the baking business.
