Ever-present in every bakery is the importance of food safety, and this starts at ingredient storage and handling. As bakeries expand, it’s important that ingredients are traceable in compliance with the Food Safety Modernization Act.

“Most bakers require information to reconcile delivery receipts, ingredient usage, storage quantities, costing, reorder points and traceability,” said Norm Searle, sales and marketing, GOE/Amherst Stainless Fabrication.

Recipe management and control goes a long way to help bakers keep track of ingredients as they move through the supply chain.

“Designing an integrated mechanical and automation solution that is expandable offers real benefits to the bakers and other food processors,” said John Hunter, sales account manager, bakery and ingredient handling, Bühler Group.

Zeppelin Systems USA’s Tracemat ensures not only a weighing precision of 1 gram but also reliability and traceability. Operators set the acceptable weight tolerances for each ingredient when programming the recipes, which keeps the system weighing minor ingredients accurately.

“Once the operator has weighted all the ingredients of the recipe and finished the operation, a printer prints a barcode label,” said David Rodrigues, regional sales engineer, Latin America, Zeppelin. “This label contains all the necessary data to trace the whole process: ingredients, specific weight, real executed weight, time of recipe composition, name and code of operator, and so on.”

With more allergens and certifications at play, bakeries will need to consider using separate dosing groups to help keep down the possibility of cross-contamination.

“Key requirements in a modern ingredient handling system include food safety systems, ingredient traceability and product interlocking to reduce the risk of cross contamination,” Mr. Hunter said.

This article is an excerpt from the May 2020 issue of Baking & Snack. To read the entire feature on ingredient handling, click here.