"The new tunnel oven works just like a giant gas-fired home oven," Ms. SchubertBarnes said. "It bakes the rolls with less moisture loss than the rack convection ovens we had before. I feel like I've gotten my old rolls back!"
Operators manually load the frozen rolls into shipping cases, 12 pans to the case. Marq case erectors supply the manual case-loading line. Stacked onto pallets, operators move the cases of rolls by forklift to the adjacent, multi-tier freezer warehouse. The dock area, too, is refrigerated to safeguard the frozen rolls when they are staged out of the four doors.
Sister Schubert's Homemade Rolls converted its former production shop into a staging area for auxiliary equipment. Some packaging supplies are also stored here.
CLEAN BY INTENT
The plant's two-shift schedule gives a three-hour break for clean-up before the next day's production. Because Sister Schubert's Homemade Rolls makes sausage-filled rolls, it operates under U.S. Department of Agriculture inspection.
"We're real sticklers for cleaning," Ms. Schubert-Barnes said. "U.S.D.A. oversight helps, because this means the plant must always operate in a sanitary fashion. I want it that way. And I can let the U.S.D.A. inspector play the 'bad guy' on rules, if I have to."
By using "hand-made" methods, Sister Schubert's Homemade Rolls earns a bonus in quality control.
"Every single roll is looked at during the process," Ms. Schubert-Barnes said. "The staff here is the reason that the rolls are so good. They handle the dough every day, and they don't let problems get by."
Moving ahead with automation was an important step for Sister Schubert's Homemade Rolls. With the production improvements, quality variables have been reduced. This inspires even more excitement from the company's enthusiastic owner.
"We're going to try to stay one step ahead; to stay on the cutting edge and to be able to stay ahead," Ms. Schubert Barnes said. "We're still the same bakery with the same attitude."
The cooled rolls continue their travel, entering the icing station. Here, two Hinds-Bock depositors with two heads each dispense icing. The stations rotate the pans as the icing flows down in multiple streams. This action mimics the action of hand drizzling.
A separate staging conveyor between the dispensing system and the IJ. White spiral Icing-Set system isolates drips. This step helps keep excess icing off the spiral's belt. To further assist sanitation, this spiral is equipped with an
1J White automatic belt washer.
From the top of the icing-set spiral, pans descend a conveyor that diverts them to one of three UBE paddle-baggers. Swept into a polyethylene bag that's sealed by a Burford twist-tier, the rolls move off to the blast freezer.
'We package rolls before freezing to make sure that product moisture isn't stripped away by the blast freezer," Ms. Schubert-Barnes said.
Dwell time in the freezer is, thus, longer than for unpackaged products, but limiting moisture loss is worth the extra expense. Also, by reducing ambient moisture within the freezer, Sister Schubert's Homemade Rolls doesn't have to defrost the coils as often.
