Slow Dough Bread Co., Houston, Texas, has seen positive growth year over year, with the exception of the pandemic. While the business obviously took a hit when its main customer channel — restaurants — were suddenly closed for health and safety, Slow Dough has grown steadily as it has recovered. With that growth and more attention from potential customers, a higher level of professionalism has been required of operations and business. Just as important as investment in the right equipment to meet capacity has been investment in food safety and maintenance/sanitation. 

Andrew Sanchez, vice president of operations and sales, hired Alejandra Blanco as food safety coordinator and monitor to get the company SQF- and GFSI-certified. The audit is in April. Blanco has spent the past five years in Florida preparing other companies for these certifications, so she’s clear on what’s expected and how to get there. 

“We currently have GMP certification, but in order to get to the next level we need that GFSI and SQF certification,” Blanco said. 

She’s implemented a strong cleaning and sanitation process. Even though the third shift — midnight to 4 a.m. every day — is a thorough clean of the entire bakery, dry cleaning happens throughout the day between production runs. Adenosine diphosphate (ADP) swabs are performed first thing in the morning before production to confirm the cleanliness of the equipment, both food and non-food contact surfaces. The bakery tests for both listeria and salmonella. 

“We are a low-risk facility because all the bread is baked,” Blanco said. “You only need to reach 165˚F to kill salmonella and our ovens get to 300˚F to 400˚F.” 

Preparing the facility for the SQF and GFSI audits, Blanco said the most challenging part is always the people. Training is critical because, as she pointed out, the employees are the final step. 

“We work on instruction to get them ready and fill in the gaps of their knowledge,” she said. 

Employees are trained first on standard GMPs as well as food defense and fraud and sanitation practices. The bakery conducts HACCP analyses and quality-control checks such as temperature. Blanco uses a bread evaluation system to analyze product quality: grain, crumb, taste, temperature, etc., to ensure that each batch has been made correctly before it’s shipped.

The other side of these certifications has been the need to track everything for traceability and recall purposes. Slow Dough uses the program Flexibake to do this, but when Blanco arrived, she implemented more Flexibake features. The ERP system allows the bakery to implement lot tracking and manage customer orders and production.

“It’s allowed us to do the lot tracking we need to do in order to become SQF-certified,” Blanco said. 

In addition to Flexibake, Slow Dough has also implemented the program MaintainX to manage maintenance orders. The system allows the company to track predictive maintenance schedules and contractors and generate and resolve work orders. Jose Molina serves as maintenance engineer and has two mechanics on his team, one for each production shift. Molina was hired last March and came to bakery from the petrol chemical engineering industry. The bakery currently tracks things like temperature, particularly in the freezers, but he hopes to one day have a full predictive maintenance program. 

“That’s my dream to be able to gather and track the data on all the equipment to anticipate maintenance issues,” he said. 

His current role, in partnership with Blanco, is readying the bakery for the upcoming audit, such as updating critical systems like air filters and compressors. 

With SQF and GSFI certification, Slow Dough will reach a new level of professionalism and food safety that will allow the bakery to take on a new level of clientele. Sanchez said the product is good enough that he gets requests from across the country; restaurant operators will try his bread at another restaurant and ask for the baker. 

“That someone tried our bread in another state and was passionate enough that they wanted to get it for themselves all the way from Houston speaks volumes about our quality,” he said. 

With the proper tools in place soon  — certifications, a silo, a tunnel oven — and its dedicated workforce, Slow Dough is ready to grow. 

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