Like every other business, bakeries must compete, and to compete effectively they must continually refine and improve their products.  

To do this, and to meet changing consumer demand, they must look at their methods and processes as well as the ingredients they use.  

Central to this is quality control and assurance and having the capability to analyse ingredients and products using advanced baking technology. One such piece of technology is the C-Cell baking quality analyser.  

If you’re running a large bakery, here are five ways of refining your production line.  

 1. Quality Test Your Raw Ingredients  

If you're going to bake consistently high-quality products, then you need to ensure that your raw ingredients are of consistently high quality too.  

This type of quality control is fundamental to refining your baking production – if the ingredients aren’t up to scratch, nothing you can do will compensate for this.  

These ingredients include:  

  • Flour 

  • Yeast 

  • water 

  • Sugar 

  • Salt 

  • Fat.  

Flour and yeast are especially critical. Changes in the amount and quality of protein in flour can have a big impact on your bake. Likewise, yeast loses potency over its lifetime, and this is a short period of around a month.  

Effective quality control means establishing clear specifications for each of these ingredients and carrying out standardised tests and sample analysis. Where ingredients fail to meet these specifications then you should reject them and communicate any issues to your suppliers.  

Consider carefully the quality parameters you’re going to work to, such as:  

  • Protein, ash and moisture content 

  • Particle size distribution 

  • Permissible levels of contaminants, such as mycotoxins 

  • Rheological tests 

  • Falling number tests for enzyme activity.  

2. Test Your Bakes 

Refinement comes from repeating processes and making small changes where necessary.  

It’s important to gauge the impact of these changes and how they influence key factors and features in your baked goods, including:  

  • Crust 

  • Crumb Structure 

  • Colour 

  • Internal Characteristics 

  • External Features  

Using the C-Cell baking analyser, you can get objective measurements of vital baking characteristics to support the refinement of your baking production.  

When you apply a test sample to C-Cell, the instrument will measure:  

  • Colour –  l*a*b* colour results, along with data such as internal crumb colour, external crust colour and depth  

  • Shape – the visual appearance of the sample, recording its concavity, shoulder and bottom roundness and oven spring  

  • Dimensions –multiple measurements for each sample slice, including the area, width and dimensions for optimum packaging  

  • Cell size – measuring cell size to quantify holes, cell areas, volumes and wall thickness 

  • Elongation – crumb cell elongation measurement, indicates how well the sample moulds.  

3. Monitor and Adjust Your Baking Production 

At different stages of the baking process, there are opportunities to make small adjustments to improve quality, reduce costs and drive efficiency.  

Improving dough quality is a key means of adjustment. Dough mixing is where the creative baking process begins, and recipe and batch control is essential for repeatable product quality.  

At the dividing stage, careful handling of the dough is vital to avoid damage to the dough structure. Controlling the force you exert on the dough will help ensure that you maintain dough quality.  

Monitoring and adjusting these processes can also help you save on ingredients such as yeast and flour improvers while still boosting your yield.  

Building monitoring and measuring into your processes using technology is the key to future-proofing your baking production and ensuring product consistency.  

4. Benchmark and Optimise Your Processes 

You should be setting clear benchmarks for your bakery production. Automation will bring certain efficiencies, but on its own, it's not enough to guarantee the consistency of the finished product you require.  

Consider which processes pose a risk to baking quality if you don’t keep track of them and ensure their consistency.  

These include:  

  • Mixing – changes in temperature or mixing time can impact product quality  

  • Sheeting and moulding – if you damage the structure of dough during these moulding processes, it can release gases before baking, or suffer damage to its cell structure  

  • Baking – applying the wrong oven temperatures can affect the oven spring of a loaf, and interfere with the whole baking process  

  • Cooling – the main goal here is to decrease the internal temperature of the bread to reach an optimum temperature that allows the loaf to keep, but cooling too rapidly can cause the sidewalls of the loaf to collapse.  

Objective and scientific baking quality analysis (see below) supports process benchmarking and optimisation, addressing potential processing issues that can affect quality.  

5. Use Objective Methods to Measure Characteristics 

The traditional way of measuring characteristics in baked goods, such as crumb texture and flavour, crust colour and loaf volume, is subjective. It involves taste, smell and touch.  

But to meet the demands of a large bakery production line you need more efficient and advanced testing methods.  

These should be objective, relying on solid data and in-depth analysis rather than sensory impressions.  

This is where C-Cell can add value to baking processes, optimise production lines and improve the quality and consistency of finished products.  

It can provide a detailed and objective analysis of samples in only five seconds, using high-definition imaging to do this.  

C-Cell also provides additional features such as the optional bread-scoring system. Bread Score is based on precision-based image capture and measurement of critical parameters, including:  

  • Number of cells 

  • Net cell elongation 

  • Non-uniformity of cells 

  • Cell diameter 

  • Number of holes 

  • Wall thickness.  

The scoring system will correlate with the bakery’s own defined set of criteria and benchmarks. 

This provides essential and practical support to bakeries looking to refine their baking production.  

Support for Your Baking Processes 

C-Cell will help you ensure your baked products maintain the high consistency consumers are looking for while meeting stringent food standards.  

For more details, please call us on +44 (0) 1925 860 401, email info@bakingqualityanalyser.com or fill in our online contact form.