CHICAGO — Monitoring air quality in baking facilities is important for food quality and the comfort of associates. Scott Houtz, president of Air Management Technologies Inc., Lewisburg, Pa., walked an audience through air quality monitoring, analysis and solutions at the American Society of Baking’s BakingTech 2022, held March 1-3.

“Whenever you’re making a decision to invest in your facilities to be able to address air quality in one form or another, you want to be able to define your goals, what am I looking to achieve by doing this?” Mr. Houtz said. “Those goals should be clearly established when you’re going into this.”

He talked about the importance of monitoring certain aspects to begin the process of analyzing and improving air quality, including temperature and humidity, wind speed dynamics, particulates and molds and pressurization.

“When you look at outdoors and indoors, that kind of ties into particulates and molds,” Mr. Houtz said. “The ambient outdoor conditions have a lot to do with what’s going on inside your facilities, a lot more than you tend to think.”

He went on to discuss how air quality is analyzed, solutions for improving air quality and how to maintain that quality, protecting the investment in solutions made by bakers.