The temperature in your industrial bakery oven has a big impact on the quality and consistency of your products. Thermal profiling with smart sensors from Reading Thermal can help you make the necessary adjustments to achieve superior products.
Reading Thermal, headquartered in Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania, has been studying, measuring, and understanding the commercial baking process for more than 25 years. We manufacture and support the SCORPION® 2 Profiling System which has become a standard in the baking industry.
Why Measure Oven Temperature?
Oven temperature causes physical and chemical reactions in dough/batter, and temperatures that are too low or too high during baking can lead to changes in fermentation and humidity levels and undesirable changes in surface coloring, texture and flavor.
If you produce bread, artisan bread, rolls, hamburger buns, cakes, biscuits, or other bread products, you know that several stages are temperature-dependent, such as oven-spring, drying/dehydration, and color formation. Too much heat coming from one direction in the oven can cause the bottoms of the loaves to burn before the crusts brown properly.
The SCORPION® 2 Temperature Sensor Array is designed to measure temperature at product level, in fixed positions across the conveyor, and delivers a true representation of what your product is experiencing over time. Different types of pluggable sensors are available, including one designed for solid or tight mesh conveyors and one for open mesh conveyors.
The sensor array is connected to the SCORPION® 2 Data Logger and then travels through the oven with the product, yielding a precise picture of temperature from side-to-side and end-to-end.
Product-core-temperature measurements can also be made simultaneously via the product probe inputs on the sensor array. This can be the difference between excellent quality and an under-baked or burnt product.
Kill Step Validation
In addition to product quality, controlling internal food temperature is key to achieving food safety. The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) requires commercial bakeries to provide validation of process controls, such as thermal kill steps, in an effort to reduce food borne pathogens, such as Salmonella, in ingredients and finished products.
The SCORPION® 2 LITE Temperature Data Logger is intended for customers who want to measure temperature only. Designed as a low-cost alternative to the full-featured SCORPION® 2 Data Logger, it simplifies the measurement of environment and internal product core temperatures.
After gathering the data, the SCORPION® Software (SV8) Food Safety Module makes it easy to calculate lethality and then generates a comprehensive report displaying cumulative log reduction. By combining this ease of measurement with robust data capture, the SCORPION® 2 System makes it simple to optimize your process while meeting food safety standards.
Keep in mind that the four key oven baking parameters – temperature, air velocity, heat flux and humidity – are interrelated. They work together to control final product quality, e.g., humidity is affected by air velocity and temperature. One major advantage of investing in the full-featured SCORPION® 2 Data Logger is that commercial bakeries can add smart sensors at any time to explore other oven variables.
To bake your products to perfection, consider the innovative SCORPION® 2 Temperature Sensor Array from Reading Thermal for your industrial bakery, as well as our other sensors and sensor arrays. Call our headquarters in Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania at (610) 678-5890 Ext. 2, or contact us online to learn more about our innovative products.