Increasing productivity is always admirable in any industry. For a bakery, that is doubly important. Even a small bakery may need to cook hundreds of loaves of bread a year. Being able to have an impressive output is important when it comes to increasing profits. If you run a bakery, no matter what the size, you should be interested in boosting productivity in various ways.
Automate A Lot Of Tasks
One of the first things you can do is automate a lot of your baking tasks. Baking might not seem like it is good for automation, but machines can do several things. This is not surprising in larger volume operations, but smaller bakeries can also benefit from it. For example, pastries that need filling used to be a long and strenuous task for bakers. Nowadays, filling equipment can pump creamy custard or whatever filling is needed safely into the pastry without bursting. Additionally, decorative designs can now be passed to automated machines to do. Take a look at what is available and decide which equipment you should bring into your bakery to make life easier.
Experiment With Your Recipes
Another interesting move for bakeries to be more productive is to change the recipes. While a drastic change in your recipe could affect the flavor, some steps won’t change a lot of things. It is can also be important when it comes to scaling. For example, you have a recipe that is good for a hundred servings. You might be able to scale it so that it delivers the same results at a thousand servings. While some recipes are easy to scale up or down, you need to experiment to get the perfect mix for your target amount.
Efficient Maintenance
One of the big bottlenecks when it comes to production is maintenance. Your ovens and other baking equipment need proper care and cleaning to stay in good condition. But spending days t clean things and tune them up can eat into your production time. Finding out several ways to do it quickly and effectively is important. For example, dry ice blasting is popular in the food industry for this reason. The process blasts chips of dry ice to scour contaminants from the surface of the equipment. It is quick, clean, and can even be done while the equipment is running. Look for similar means of maintenance for your equipment.
Increasing Capacity
Another change that you should make is to increase the capacity of your bakery. For example, if you often have trays waiting to go into the oven, that is not as efficient. Adding more ovens should help with that. Additionally, capacity also refers to how much you can keep in storage. Instead of waiting for stock to be sold, you can keep on producing.
Hiring Trained Staff
Experience can also ensure that your processes are better. If you have experienced cooks and staff, then they would be aware of what to do. This is much better than having trainees on your staff who need to take things slow and still learning. To make the processes as efficient as possible, you’ll want a team you can trust. To get this, you should be interviewing your potential employees thoroughly. It would help if you also looked closely at their backgrounds to see what they can bring to the table. Hiring a secondary manager to manage the baking process can be worth the investment.
Analyzing And Improving Efficiency
There is also the need to look at your processes. There might be several inefficiencies that you don’t notice at first. For example, if you are packing cakes in boxes, it might be much better to have bigger assembled boxes so that you can slip the cake in smoothly rather than assembling specific boxes for each cake. It might save you a few minutes, but that adds up to hundreds of cakes. Look for potential situations like these where you can shave off minutes in processing. The result is that you will save hours which can be used for producing more. With a good analysis, you can then move on to changing things for the better.
Improved productivity can mean a lot for a business in the food industry. The margins are thin, so raising potential profits can be a big boost. Think of which of these you can implement in your business but be smart about what products you use them for. If they are not selling, then your productivity boost will not be any big help.
