George Kordas stared in the face of a crossroad two years ago. With the business briskly growing at Metropolitan Baking, the president of the Hamtramck, Mich.-based company needed to get more out of his equipment, especially the aging bun line. Adding more shifts wouldn’t work because the bakery was already running 20 hours a day, six days a week, with maintenance and sanitation afterward.

Then there came those challenges with running an old workhorse on its last legs.

“Occasionally, we were getting breakdowns,” he recalled. “It would cause us some serious downtime. When you don’t have that time, it causes a whole bunch of delays.”

This year, the family-owned and -operated company fired up its new bun line featuring a conveyorized proofer and oven and new packaging equipment. Kordas projects the 35,000-square-foot, multi-million-dollar expansion will boost capacity by 35% to 40% at the now 140,000-square-foot facility, which includes much-needed additional warehouse space.

He added the new line will also enhance quality and reduce perennial breakdowns of equipment, especially those annoying 10-second stoppages caused by pan jams and other issues several times a day.

The move also enables Metropolitan Baking to better employ its labor force by shifting job duties to make it a more comfortable and productive place to work.

“We were getting to the point of no return,” said the third-generation family owner. “We were basically going to run these [machines] until the wheels fell off, and we didn’t want it to be a catastrophic event.”

For many bakeries, thorough maintenance on a regular basis can keep aging equipment in vintage condition. It’s much like keeping a 20-year-old truck that’s still on the road with plenty of miles left to go.

Jeff Dearduff, owner of JED Manufacturing Services, pointed out that good maintenance comes down to having a skilled staff with the right mindset to identify wear and tear and strive to keep bakery mixers, ovens and more operating at peak performance. Wishing aging equipment was new doesn’t solve any problems.

“If you don’t care about it, you don’t care for it,” he observed. “That’s what it comes down to in the end.”

For bakeries with machinery that’s 40, 50 or more years older, the additional conundrum is finding parts, many of which are no longer available for repairs.

“That doesn’t mean you can’t hire somebody to make a drawing of that part and go to a machine shop and get it made better than what the original was, but people don’t think to do that,” Dearduff explained. “What people do is cobble it up. They try to weld it back together and get another day out of the machine. That’s where the attitude comes in. The people who take care of this equipment need to get to a place where they treat it like a new piece of equipment.”

Many of these commonly called tanks have been built to last for decades, and in many bakeries, they’re still firing away even though they are much older than the maintenance engineers who work on them.

“I believe steel bolted together in the 1960s is strong and robust and will be there if you take care of it,” Dearduff said.

All too often, a bakery’s lack of capacity often results in a squeeze on the maintenance crew’s time to do their jobs right, noted Rowdy Brixey, president, Brixey Engineering. If the oven can’t meet growing customer demands, for instance, the operation will find itself in production during those extra hours that should be dedicated to maintenance and sanitation.

“Many times, it’s not because it’s a bad oven,” he said. “It’s because you’re operating it beyond its capabilities and not putting reliability back in. Now, all of a sudden, you’re looking at excessive equipment downtime and thinking about the total cost of ownership.”

For Metropolitan Baking, Kordas expects the bakery’s maintenance team to keep the recently installed bun line as good as new for years to come. He added the impact of that line will have a huge effect on its ability to supply the growing number of schools and national foodservice, institutional, retail and convenience store chains with a wide variety of frozen bread, buns and rolls.

“When we go full-tilt in the summer, this new conveyorized proofer and oven — as long as they’re well-lubricated and oiled — really shouldn’t stop,” he said.

Regular, quality maintenance will never turn an old workhorse into a thoroughbred, but it will keep the old, reliable system running and doing its job without the need to send it out to pasture.

This article is an excerpt from the February 2025 issue of Baking & Snack. To read the entire feature on Maintenance, click here.