Running a commercial or industrial bakery can be an incredibly challenging endeavor, but one that is essential in providing us all with freshly baked bread and other tasty treats. While many of the basics of baking have remained the same over centuries, technological advances allow bakeries to optimize their baking process like never before. Baking process optimization with thermal profiling provides incredible insight into how temperature is managed throughout the oven during your production cycle, giving detailed information on how effectively your products are being baked.
Reading Thermal’s thermal profiling solutions are designed to provide quality control and peace of mind that the temperature-dependent aspects of your baking process are precisely managed. By measuring the primary baking parameters with precise data analytics, Reading Thermal can help you quickly identify any inconsistencies in baking performance and optimize your baking process accordingly. As a result, bakers can achieve precise baking results based on oven settings, maintain accurate temperatures throughout the cycle, enjoy consistent product quality regardless of oven variation, and ensure regulatory compliance for food safety every time.
Finding Inefficiencies in Your Ovens
Nothing functions at peak efficiency forever. Over time, your oven conditions will change as parts wear out, the environment changes, and other factors. Because of these incremental changes, your baked goods will become increasingly inconsistent, leading to a drop in quality, performance efficiency, and customer satisfaction. The baking process depends on absolute control over every variable, which is all the more important when you’re an industrial or commercial bakery with multiple operational ovens.
Knowing that your ovens aren’t functioning at peak efficiency is different from knowing what’s actually wrong with them. Diagnosing the problem can’t be solved by taking your oven apart – you need visibility into the internal conditions of what your baked goods go through in each cycle. By accounting for the oven environment and baking parameters, bakers can understand which areas of the baking process are inconsistent, underperforming, or inefficient.
Thermal profiling provides that visibility. By measuring the exact temperature of your baked goods throughout the baking cycle, you can pinpoint inefficiencies and any issues with specific ovens. The SCORPION® 2 Profiling System provides side-to-side and end-to-end profiling of your conveyor belt, monitoring the entirety of your oven environment for air velocity, humidity, temperature, and heat flux. This is important precisely because there will often be cooler and warmer zones within your oven, and pinpointing those areas is crucial for making the proper adjustments.
Optimizing Your Baking Process with Thermal Profiling
Once you know where the inefficiencies are, then it’s time to optimize your baking process. With precise thermal data, you can make small changes that significantly impact how consistently and reliably your products turn out. Are some ovens running cooler than others? Make sure they’re set to the same temperature before start-up. Are there dead zones in different parts of the bake cycle? Adjust air velocity or belt speed to heat those areas evenly. Do all of your baked products need to meet the same specification? Thermal profiling will provide insight into how well each batch is cooked and whether any adjustments need to be made.
Baking process optimization with thermal profiling is easier with Reading Thermal at your side. If you’re interested in our services, call us at (610) 678-5890 Ext. 2, or contact us online for more details about our innovative products.