Deep-Freeze Refrigeration, Baking Heat, Robotics & AI

Fresh produced bakery goods are primarily available in food retailers, bakery outlets, and in some cases also in gas stations stores. Some bake-off baking stations are truly innovative – small future laboratories, so to speak, in which deep-freeze refrigeration, baking heat, robotics and AI are combined. Operators can use them to mitigate several problems, especially staff shortages. by Dieter Mailänder, Redaktionsbüro Dieter Mailänder

Fresh produced bakery goods are primarily available in food retailers, bakery outlets, and in some cases also in gas stations stores. Some bake-off baking stations are truly innovative – small future laboratories, so to speak, in which deep-freeze refrigeration, baking heat, robotics and AI are combined. Operators can use them to mitigate several problems, especially staff shortages.

Fresh, warmed up baked goods play an important role in many European countries. Even though artisan bakeries are valued, their numbers are falling. This is due to the fact that end customers are increasingly shifting their purchases to food retailers or large bakeries with their own branch networks, in whose outlet’s dough pieces are freshly baked. Thanks to the so-called bake-off technology, the operators of the baking stations convey freshness to their customers, and above all by the aroma of the freshly produced baked goods.

Deep-Freeze Refrigeration and Baking Heat

MIWE creates the necessary conditions for a freshness concept with increasingly refined refrigeration technology in conjunction with equally refined thermal baking technology. To be efficient, operators must react flexibly to demand and bake their bakery products several times a day in a short period of time.

This high degree of freshness is the prerequisite for rapid sales. It requires a close integration of deep-freeze refrigeration and baking heat – both in the central production and on site at the bake-off station. But the temporal und spatial decoupling of dough processing and baking offers further advantages, for example:
• High flexibility in the compilation of the range of products i.e. the breadth and depth of the range of products will become more attractive to customers.
• The reduction of unattractive and expensive night work and thus better opportunities to find qualified staff.
• Processes are individually adapted to the dough types in all of the heating and cooling phases. It does not matter whether a company works with a delay or interruption of fermentation, whether it freezes its products fully or partially cooked or partially baked. 
• Skillful control of temperature, humidity, and time in central production, and in the bake-off stations.

To read the entire article, please access your complimentary e-copy of Frozen Food Europe May-June, 2024 issue here.