Ask Scott McCally why he joined the baking industry, and he’ll tell you it’s the industry that chose him. While completing his engineering degree at The University of North Texas, McCally worked as a drafter at a mechanical engineering consulting company, followed by five years running his own home construction business and then as a commercial greenhouse manufacturer. It wasn’t until a colleague from his first job recommended him for an open position at Stewart Systems that McCally entered the world of baking.

“Because of a simple decision to follow up on a draftsman opening passed to me by my AutoCAD professor ten years prior…that ultimately led to the baking industry,” he said.

McCally has since held several positions across Middleby’s brands, including thermal products manager for Stewart Systems and vice president of engineering for Middleby Bakery. Today, he serves as president of Auto-Bake Serpentine and global sweet goods category manager for Middleby Bakery while also assisting in the onboarding of various new Middleby brands and management of several Middleby Worldwide regional offices. 

Throughout these roles, McCally says a love for the creative and innovative process remains at the heart of his DNA and is what he enjoys most. 

“I'm proud of the teams that we've created at each one of these brands,” he said. “I get a lot of joy seeing how well our group collectively interacts with each other, and as iron sharpens iron, how we feed off each other.”

McCally is also heavily involved with the American Society of Baking (ASB), including an upcoming role as marketplace committee chair for BakingTech 2027. 

“I see ASB as uniquely positioned and differentiated from ABA or BEMA and others in this technical education piece,” he explained. “So because of my background…I just love everything that they do.”

Looking forward, one of the biggest challenges McCally sees facing the industry is the rise of personal medical devices that allow consumers to monitor their physiological health data in real time. McCally sees this technology as an even greater threat than GLP-1 weight loss drugs, as the data these devices provide will inform more consumers’ dietary choices and lead many to avoid baked goods that don’t align with their health goals. 

“It means we're going to have to get much healthier,” McCally warned. “The physiological function of ingredients in the body will become as or more important than characteristic development of the product itself. I think it's going to be great for the human population to become healthier, but it's definitely going to have a measurable impact on those in our industry who don't recognize the threat.”

Here, McCally shares how cake and muffin producers can drive cost reductions on their lines and enhance product quality.

Where do you see producers looking to improve their cake and muffin lines today? 

For any baker, cake or otherwise, the product is always top of mind — that’s quality and consistency for their consumers. In the back of their mind currently is the real pain they have with accelerated costs of raw materials and labor. Our customers are looking for solutions to help them improve their operational efficiency and equipment whose performance is drifting into an unsatisfactory state. From our perspective, we aim to guide our customers at ways to achieve longer run times, meaning fewer changeovers, which maximizes the uptime of the line itself.

How can bakers drive cost reduction on their lines?

Bakers are fighting increases in raw material prices (5% to 10% increase in wheat, 15% to 25% increase in eggs, etc., over the past 24 months) and then of course labor costs and the labor shortage is another significant headwind adding another 10% to 20% cost on top of that. At the backside of this, GLP-1 drugs are leading to a reduction of sales anywhere from 5% to 7% across all sweet goods categories over the last 12 to 24 months. We have cost increases as well as sales decreases.

Now more than ever, we want to figure out ways to optimize production and help customers focus on their key products and run those longer. In this season of uncertainty, we develop operational efficiencies with the customer to meet their production goals. Is there equipment such as depositors that need to be tuned or modernized in some way to reduce giveaway? If you have a reduction in sales, you need to have an equal if not more significant offset in total expenses. 

Where can bakers automate to reduce reliance on labor?  

There are a couple of places. If I have a sweet goods or cake line, the most manual way is a single-piston filler that’s filling each individual cavity on a pan by hand. The next step to automate from there is a four- or six-across head, and then you put the pan on a conveyor. We can put an automatic oiler and depositor on it, and then the pan is grabbed and racked at the other end. When you go from that stage of semi-automation, you go to more of a fully automated Auto-Bake style line where you don’t have people touching the pan at all. The pan is automated through every piece of equipment. A pan change may still be manual or a fully automated pan changing system where you have a robot pulling the pans off and then stacking them on a rack.

How can bakers reduce waste and product giveaway on these lines?

Waste and product giveaway come primarily from two points. No. 1 is obviously makeup, and no. 2 is when you’re taking product off the line. At the depositor, the wider the line goes, the faster the line goes, and the smaller the product is, the more challenging this point is. One of the biggest upgrades we see from customers on an existing line when they’re trying to become more efficient and reduce product loss is upgrading or replacing their existing depositing equipment. In the high-speed and very small product category, we must dive down and track with the pan so that the relative distance between the cup and the nozzle is very small, and the speed differential is zero, this eliminates tails and batter on the pan deck. This is essential for target precision as an Auto-Bake line runs at a continuous speed without indexing while in operation. Our latest acquisition of Gorreri has exceptional depositing, denesting, injecting and pan oiling equipment that can achieve this level of precision and accuracy.

On the back end, the same problem exists. We don’t want bad transfers on product conveyors. Now more and more because product is being pulled away on the conveyor so fast, we can’t just drop the product over the conveyor and allow it to take off. We must track both the pick and place, which is very common when we pick from the line and then place directly into final packaging.

How can producers automate cake and muffin production while still maintaining the quality they expect?

From the automation standpoint, we’re watching the line remotely as much as possible, so that we can pinpoint parameters that may be drifting or that maybe even the operator doesn’t see. And as time goes on, we’re going to pass some of those supervisory functions onto an artificial intelligence (AI) model, which can monitor those parameters and aggregate and summarize data in a way that will allow operators to make decisions to improve certain processes. 

How do Auto-Bake’s offerings help bakers improve efficiency and product quality?

We’ve coined the term “flexigility” for customers that need to flexibly move from one product to another quickly. That could just mean a different flavor, or it could also be a different format that requires a pan change. We offer fully automated systems that allow them to have what we call a no-gap changeover, meaning there’s no pan gap difference from one product to the next. To do that, our system allows them to have multiple depositors on the line, as well as a robotic pan change system, all working in synchronization so that you can easily go from vanilla to chocolate or even a small mini muffin to a celebration cake with very limited, if any, downtime. This is key for our customers, especially those in snack goods and fresh cakes, as they are producing many different formats and flavors because that’s where the customer demand is.