Like everyone else these days, wholesale bakers are looking to tighten belts and shore up budgets. Thoughts naturally turn to streamlining operations and trimming costs, usually by cutting excess materials, resources or processing time.

If they keep a few rules in mind, wholesale bakers shouldn't have difficulty finding ways to cut material and resource waste. Cost savings will naturally follow, says Dale Mediate, director of sustainability, Flowers Foods, Thomasville, Ga.

“Waste can be found in a bakery in many areas: time, energy, water, ingredients, packaging, scaling, scrap, trash and transportation,” Mediate says. “In the baking industry, the one area that receives the most attention is scrap — process waste or damaged product — probably because it's the area most easily tied to cost. But bakers who are serious about sustainability must consider all forms of waste.”

Bakers looking to track and measure waste should begin by formalizing a method to measure it, he adds. Those initial numbers will not only allow bakers to hone in on processes that could be streamlined and resources that could be better managed, they'll give bakers a jumping off point from which they can measure progress.

Flower Foods measures waste against output, or throughput, Mediate says. Managers measure the input — or mix pounds — and then compare them against the output — net pounds sold.

“We define the difference between the two as waste,” he says. “Energy, water and trash are all measured as factors of manufacturing output or finished pounds. Transportation is measured against net pounds sold.”

“Our overall objective is to increase pounds sold while minimizing resources used to bake and transport our products,” Mediate adds. By measuring waste in this manner — mix pounds minus net pounds sold — bakers can isolate waste not tracked and measured by traditional methods. Such waste areas include efficiency, scaling and scrap.

“Every baking company's operation is different, so I really can't estimate what amount of waste reduction bakers could realize,” Mediate says. “I can say that the industry needs to refine the tools it uses to identify unmeasured waste. This is an ongoing challenge, but one that will yield new ways for bakers to approach waste reduction.

Reformulation

Tweaking the baking process can reduce waste in unexpected ways, Mediate adds. He offers an example from his own company of how waste reduction can benefit bakeries. Flowers found an opportunity to reduce waste by switching certain bread formulas to concentrated bulk liquid yeast at a more concentrated level than it had used in the past. The company worked with suppliers and with the quality control department to determine the right amount of concentration that would not compromise product quality, Mediate says.

The change to the more concentrated yeast allowed the bakery to run fewer clean-in-place cycles than it had run previously. It also reduced the number of yeast deliveries to Flowers bakeries — saving transportation and material costs — and cut the bakery's water consumption. The company has saved an estimated 4.7 million gallons of water annually as the result of the initiative, he adds.

Energy reduction

Along with making ingredient and process changes, experts also advise bakers to look at energy use with an eye toward eradicating waste. The goal here is to find ways to deliver chilled water, hot water, compressed air and humidity using less energy, and in turn, lower cost. Of course, these cost-reduction measures need to be done without affecting the baking process, says Dave Laybourn, director of marketing, Lime Energy, Glendora, Calif.

Laybourn polled Lime Energy engineers, who offered several simple tips for isolating and ending energy waste in baking facilities. First look to your chillers. The simplest thing bakers can do is to keep the condenser fans clean. Dirt inhibits the heat transfer and restricts the airflow, which inhibits chilling capability, the engineers say. Also, determine the lowest condenser temperature at which the refrigeration equipment can operate. Try to run the chiller to operate as close to that temperature as possible.