What's driving the UK bakery industry forward?
Parts of the UK bakery industry have recently made significant investments to replace ageing bakery lines with highly efficient new equipment. As the part of this five-year investment, Olympus Automation has been the largest UK supplier of turnkey flour and minor addition plants with a total market value circa £30 million. State-of-the-art systems use the very latest vacuum technology and are achieving world class accuracy as well improved energy efficiency. The systems incorporate hygienic design throughout which has been optimised for minimal maintenance.
As in most industries there is a major drive for exceptional efficiencies, be this in the form of waste reduction or improved efficiency. There is also a great desire to improve product quality and have the flexibility to meet consumers’ demands for more varied bread products with additions of minor ingredients. Unrelenting consumer demand means that during projects bakeries have to maintain a 99% order fulfilment presenting significant challenges that Olympus Automation had to overcome.
How to achieve a fantastic product?
Fantastic bread is soft, has a good crumb structure and retains a high degree of freshness. Aside from excellent raw materials an accurate and automated process is critical in delivering a consistently great product. Superior SCADA control and automation has facilitated big improvements in the consistency of product as the process becomes highly controlled and dependable.
Waste reduction
Accurate dosing and monitoring of total plant performance allows plants to understand and target waste at their sites in a much more dynamic manner. SCADA plant visualisation clearly highlights areas of waste and loss in performance, prompting action. Improved powder handling and dosing accuracy reduces material and energy waste.
“To be excellent, everything that you do needs to be excellent. A big part of being excellent comes down to the design of the bakeries in which all aspects of safety, efficiency and ergonomics were considered. The powder handling systems installed are innovatively designed to maximise performance within the bakeries and achieve outputs of 10,000 loaves per hour.”
Maintaining order fulfilment
Due to the high demand for product in the UK, maintaining order fulfilment whilst major projects are being undertaken is of the highest priority. Manufacturers cannot afford to disappoint customers with missed order when investing for the future. Tackling this requires a very high attention to detail in the planning phases and execution to plan or orders would be missed. Robust systems and experience in the industry allows suppliers like ourselves to consistently deliver to plan.
Product variety
The industry has become more finely tuned to consumer’s different tastes and nutritional demands and matching this demand requires more variety and flexibility from bakeries. Minor additions to recipes have become critically important in offering many different varieties of loaf, with recipe content such as fat, yeast and provers changing to reflect individual’s preferences. These variations force bakeries to adopt robust automation systems to ensure recipes are correctly adhered to and orders fulfilled.
New liquid dosing technology
Outdated liquid dosing systems in bakeries have led to unnecessary ingredient wastage and slow delivery times. Patented Batchmate™ technology offers a saving of at least 10% on raw ingredients with an unequalled liquid dosing accuracy of 5g in volumes up to 2kg and 0.1% in all volumes above. Dosing time is reduced by 20% compared to traditional methods because the system allows for a significantly higher velocity of delivery.