"Putting in a second tunnel oven will let us go into continuous processing," Ms. Worthington said, and the new bakery was laid out to accept a second oven in the near future.
Cookie dough, supplied by the mixing room, is run through an automated Rondo sheeting line. The bulk dough travels through gauge rollers that reduce it to the required thickness. The crusts, cut into rounds and deposited into Eli's two-piece cake pans, are conveyed to the tunnel oven and baked.
Racks of frozen cakes are wheeled out of the blast freezer according to production cycle. Operators place the cakes into FoodTool slicers that both cut the cake into uniform portions and insert divider papers between slices. Groups of cutting machines serve each horizontal form/fill/seal packaging line where cakes receive a tight shrinkwrap before they are inserted into cartons. All cakes run through metal detectors.
Operators load cartons into shipping cases and palletize the cases on standardsize skids. Each case carries printed date codes. Palletized cases are stretchwrapped for stability and moved into the small on-site holding freezer. Most items stay in this freezer no more than five days before being loaded out for distribution through the plant's four-door refrigerated dock.
Improved quality assurance procedures were a goal for the new plant. Having operated the new line for only a couple of months, Ms. Worthington and her QA staff are still adjusting procedures.
"When we changed from rack ovens to a tunnel oven, we also changed our critical control points," Ms. Worthington explained. Tests are run on incoming raw materials, ingredients and packaging. Inprocess checks involve pulling a number of crusts and cakes from each batch as they emerge from the oven. The supervisor breaks open the cake to check its interior texture. Packaged samples from each batch are held for shelf life study, too.
VISIBLE R&D. Moving into a new plant gave new life to Eli's R&D activities, and this function also helps support the showmanship and consumer outreach that's so much a part of the Eli's business persona.
"We have the space and ability to setup a full R&D effort," Ms. Worthington said. "And we placed it right in front of our customers."
A unique angle to Eli's R&D and QA activities is the window between the lab and the on-site Eli's Cheesecake World retail shop. Customers in the bakery/cafe can see new products as they are created.
"Among our goals is to show off our products," Mr. Schulman said. "That's why we made our R&D lab visible from the retail store. That's why we conduct tours of the plant for school, community and customer groups." These tours take people right out into the plant, guiding them along an aisle that lets them see decorating and packaging functions and catch a glimpse of cheese cakes coming off the large Spiral Cooler.
"We consider the tours a way to give Eli's to the community," Mr. Schulman said.
The on-site bakery/cafe attracts hundreds of shoppers daily. It's also an outstanding demonstration facility, merchandising products to Eli's distributors, buyers, vendors and customers.
"This is Eli'shome,"Mr. Schulman said. And it plans to entertain a lot of guests. "We didn't want to just build a factory. We wanted to also let our customers know how important we think they are."
BAKING & SNACK - January 1997
Baked crusts are wheeled to the front of the oven line. Here, operators remove them from the racks and place them on the in-feed sections of the two in-line batter depositors. Filled with cream cheese batter, the cake pans travel down a short conveyor leading to the front of the tunnel oven. Operators load the oven belt in a tightly spaced pattern to maximize oven capacity.
The baked cakes leave the oven and travel through the Spiral Cooler.
Installed near the long tunnel oven are three Dahlen rack ovens. These handle the company's many short-run cake varieties and custom orders.
Eli's makes both original and chocolate cookie crusts. Recently, the company developed a cookie called "Just the Crust," a popular choice for airline feeding. The sheeting line forms these cookies, too, stamping surface designs as needed and cutting pieces to proper size.
"There's still some hand work on makeup," Ms. Worthington explained. This is needed for the double-deposit and swirled-batter styles.
Many of Eli's new upscale cheesecakes and tarts require manual decorating. This is done on the cooled cake before freezing. Two, and sometimes three, manual decoration lines run most days at Eli's. As the number of decorated items in Eli's product line increases, the company will adjust by installing a longer manual decorating line.
FREEZE, CUT, PACK, SHIP. Decorated and non-decorated cakes are frozen on mobile racks and wheeled into the blast freezing room. Temperature and air-flow in the freezer create operating conditions of -10'F (-23'C).
