In this episode of the Troubleshooting Innovation podcast, Dave Van Laar, industry expert and consultant, talks about achieving what you can’t see, including troubleshooting the baking curve and managing variables beyond the oven. Hosted by Joanie Spencer, Commercial Baking editor-in-chief.
Sponsored by Reading Bakery Systems.
Joanie Spencer: This podcast is all about troubleshooting when it comes to product innovation, so today, let’s talk about how the oven can impact production of a new baked good.
Dave Van Laar: The oven is the most critical step in the process and one that really distinguishes us from other industries. A lot of things are mixed, a lot of things are dried, but we’re pretty unique in that we run things through an oven. No. 1, the first thing we need to do is know our equipment. You need to know your oven. I believe that’s one of the most important aspects that’s often neglected, and I know in my career, it was something we just didn’t know how to do. We made assumptions about what was going on in the box, but we didn’t have any devices to measure or understand what was going on inside the box. Today, there are measuring systems and tools that have become much more sophisticated. We can measure the temperature across the band and down the oven, we can measure air movement, moisture and many other things today. We really can understand what’s going on inside the oven. No. 1 would be to understand that. Make sure the oven is doing what you expect it to do. That there are no cold spots, no hot spots, no places where there’s no air circulation. Then thinking about this, the more I thought about it, this is where science really comes into play during product development. This is where it really needs to be science, because the chemistry involved is pretty complex. The R&D person needs to know the desired results so they can formulate accordingly. It’s not just a matter of throwing a bunch of things together and making a good product. It’s something they have to anticipate: the chemical reactions in the oven. And some of those reactions are really significant: CO2 releasing, the yeast starts swelling, the development of the amylase activity, gluten coagulation, the water to steam, the rise in the cookie or cracker or bread, sugar carbonizes at certain levels, and the Maillard reactions happen. There are lots of things the product development person needs to anticipate as they add ingredients, and every one of those reactions are caused by an ingredient that’s up into the dough that has a reaction at a certain time and temperature.
Spencer: We’ve talked several times throughout this podcast about the need for R&D and operations and equipment and ingredient suppliers to get involved in that product development super early. It sounds like the R&D and the ingredient folks really need to be considering the oven early on. Would you say that’s true?
Van Laar: No doubt about it. I did education in a plant, they were doing a new cracker item, and they had a lot of new, unique ingredients in the item. They had to be handled in a certain way and baked in a certain way. The plant was having a hard time getting used to that, because it was so much different than their traditional baking. It was a new mindset and experience for them, where R&D had left production to finish and production was still struggling with it.
Spencer: Let’s talk about the finished product. It comes out of the oven and it’s out of spec. First assumption is to blame the oven, right?
Van Laar: Actually, Joanie, the first assumption is to blame the flour. That’s always been the standard. We love to blame something and flour is that big variable, it’s a big ingredient. But you’re exactly right — we start to blame what we can’t see, and that’s just natural for people to do. We blame things that are out of our control. The first assumption most people make is, “It’s not something I did.” Here we go again: Know your oven. The oven panel we had at the technical convention was one of my favorite sessions and also one that was well-attended. We had experts talking about how ovens worked in quite a bit of detail. These sessions were aimed at the operator, understanding what goes into product development and to make sure all the equipment is working properly. We’d been through direct fire gas ovens, and we found half the burners were not working properly, and we were wondering why it wasn’t baking according to our anticipation. What has changed in the oven? Has anything been modified? I was interested, one time, one of the panelists asked if we made repairs and painted inside: “Did they use gray, silver or black paint?” And I thought, “How trivial is that?” But it’s significant, and you don’t think of those things. The maintenance man that made those changes, he’s grabbing the color that’s in the can closest to him. It’s not something we think that much about, and nobody goes in to look at that. We went through a project where we had the fire box, the indirect fire really needed to be rebuilt, the bricks were falling apart, so we went in and rebuilt the burner box. New exhausts, new everything, new gas coming in. And the first batch of cookies we put through the oven were burned to a crisp. What happened? Well we did it again and they still came burned, so we started doing some testing and we found the temperature probes were put in a different place when they replaced the oven bricks. So we were actually reading a different temperature than we were before. Nothing had really changed; we changed our settings because we were getting a reading that was different. Now that’s an extreme case, but things like that can happen. We just had to readjust that and get it back where we knew we should be.
Spencer: What do you think is harder to troubleshoot: a product that you’ve been making day after day, year after year, then it comes out of the oven out of spec, or a new product that hasn’t been in production for very long, and it comes out not as you anticipated it when you were developing the product?
Van Laar: To me, that’s where R&D is not done until it’s been perfected, if you will, in the plant. That’s where, if these chemical reactions are not happening as they anticipated, it’s really outside the scope of an oven operator to fix that. It’s something they have to measure. We take quality measurements, obviously, and there’s no such thing as a good or bad product. We measure taste, texture and appearance. Marketing has a concept in mind and they want it to taste like something or look like something, and we need to copy that. Within that, there are certain parameters we need to meet with moisture, pH, water activity and things like that. But we need to match what marketing had in mind, and if the product isn’t doing that, I think that’s more of an issue of R&D tweaking in the plant than it is a problem of the plant.
In any of these events, one word continues to come back to me: Consistency. As we talked about in episode three, consistency in mixing is crucial. We have new ingredients, most times, in new products. Are they being handled properly? Are all the mixing instructions being followed exactly? Is the temperature correct on all the ingredients? So we do need to troubleshoot, just like anything else, but if it involves that chemistry in the oven, it’s more than just an operator issue.
Spencer: I was sitting in that oven panel you referenced, and I’ve seen a couple oven panels at the technical conference, and it’s one of my favorites because I’m always learning. I think we should see more non-operators sitting in those panels to hear and participate in those conversations.
Van Laar: Not everyone understands what their part brings to the whole. Again, the maintenance person that paints that section of the oven inside may not understand what’s going on in the oven. Or other people make adjustments or changes and they don’t understand what’s going on, so it’s really important to understand the process by all the disciplines involved.
Spencer: Let’s talk for a minute about the baking curve. I’m a journalist, not a baker, but…
Van Laar: Joanie, you keep going and we’ll get you on the line for good!
Spencer: Haha I’ve got to keep going to these sessions and having these conversations so I can keep learning. I’m always so fascinated by the baking curve. I want to just ask you a couple questions about that. What are the variables that a baker needs to consider when it comes to the baking curve, and what are the attributes that are going to either impact the baking curve or be impacted by it?
Van Laar: Not to drop an advertisement, but the American Bakers Association has courses that are available and written so the people in the plants can understand exactly that. The metrics we look at in the oven are the heat flux (the relationship between the convective and radiant heat), temperature, humidity, air velocity — and there are controls to control all those. So as the heat is directed in the oven, we do go through that baking curve, as you so well know. That curve is made up of three stages. First, we set the product; we get the shape we need and the moisture starts to get released from the product. Phase two is where we really bake it, take out the moisture and set the final shape, size of the product. The third stage of the baking curve is to get the color. When we talk about ovens, we have to talk about the different types of ovens, too. The most common are the direct fire gas and the recirculation indirect. So those baking curves are significantly different. Air flow in the direct fire gas is much less than in the indirect, and the temperature curve of the zones is more gradual than it is in an indirect. When we think about certain things like yeast, we don’t want to kill the yeast before it does its activity, but when it’s done, we do want to kill it. That’s crucial in that heat developing inside the product of how that comes forward. The other things happening, obviously if we have the last zone too hot, and we crystallize the sugar, we’re going to get some dark product. All those things need to be considered as the heat is coming up in the product. The other thing we do is we have to cool it when we’re done. We don’t want excess heat in it, we need to have enough heat to get the baking process completed and then cool it down to get it packaged.
Spencer: Do you think that’s something bakers could overlook: the cooling time and how it relates to the baking time?
Van Laar: We need to have significant run out of the oven so we can get the product off the band. But after that, it’s got to be ambient temperature to package it or there are problems we’re going to find otherwise. A lot of folks do that with spiral cooling, some do it with ambient, some go overhead, some bring it back and forth. There are many ways to do it to save on real estate. It’s something we are considering more and more, as something we don’t like to have to do, but it has to be done.
Spencer: Right. I’ve been in a couple bakeries that really took advantage of hybrid ovens, and some of them were doing that to “future-proof,” because it provided more options for their product in the future. Have you seen that trending?
Van Laar: Hybrid ovens have been discussed for a long time. I go way back and we were looking at ways to do things, like getting color on product and getting highlights; direct fire gas works really well for that. There are other things that work better for an indirect. But the hybrids are something I think are making great inroads recently in the industry. Another thing that’s really coming to its own is getting the moisture out of product using radio frequency, like a big radar range within the oven. That really saves on space. It was tried back in the ’80s and it worked somewhat successfully. I don’t think it was as understood as it is today, but now there’s no question that there’s an application for that. I’ve seen rapid changeover in ovens being developed too, so pans can almost be changed instantaneously and the product will continue to run through the oven even though there’s a changeover. That’s so important in the bread industry where we’re running a full range of products every day; changeover becomes a huge issue. Yes, it’s really important that we continue to embrace technology, and I think that’s where the product development people have strong input with the equipment manufacturers, and interactions happen at trade shows and in labs. They’ve always been very receptive to new ideas, and therefore they can perfect the equipment. And it takes involvement from both sides.
Spencer: It’s pretty amazing how, now more than ever, there are conversations being had between the R&D specialists in a bakery and an equipment manufacturer. There aren’t these fiefdoms anymore. Everyone is starting to understand how each area of product development impacts another area or the next stage of development.
Van Laar: And I think that’s out of necessity, Joanie, with the bakers of the past who had their own peculiarities and ways of doing things. Pick a sandwich cookie, for instance. Ideally, we’d make that on a direct fire, mesh oven. Many people make that cookie on an indirect, solid band oven. They use docker pins to take care of the steam pockets, but if the product development person has a specific piece of equipment in mind that they’re developing around, he or she is probably going to develop it a bit differently than if they had a green board on which to write. Over time, we’ve seen a lot of that through the processing and depositing from multiple layers and multiple ingredients into the cookie. But in the oven, I think what’s happened recently is the equipment manufacturers have developed their own labs. These labs are extensive today; there are small bakeries in these manufacturers. We see our development people going in there and working at length. When they do that, obviously the equipment engineers get to see what they’re doing, and they can have lively discussions on what they’re trying to accomplish. I think some of those barriers that equipment held before are being broken and it will take some time to get some new equipment out there, but it’s coming.
Spencer: The next thing I want to talk about is the stories that I’ve heard, and I know you and I have talked about this several times in the past. We touched on it with mixer operators, in a previous episode, but I hear these stories about the oven settings being changed from shift to shift because one operator thinks he or she knows better than the shift before. The mere mention of that can just make a director of operations cringe. So how does a bakery get all the shifts on board to maintain consistency through the oven settings?
Van Laar: Very simple, Joanie. We take all the knobs off the oven. I would love to do that sometime, just put fake knobs so they can turn all they want and it doesn’t affect anything. But that happens everywhere; it happens in packaging, equipment, everywhere in the plant. In the oven, it’s more dangerous because as you mentioned several times, you cannot see that. Technology has really helped us in that arena. The software that’s driving the ovens today has levels of security on it so the operator interface can make certain changes within certain limits, so they may be able to change temperature up and down five percent, they may be able to change some air movement, but they can’t make huge changes. The fact that the gold standard is still there … they come back to that.
One problem we had before when we were on paper, is the gold standard changed all the time. If I’m running an oven and I make changes, they’re allowable changes to get the product back into spec or get my desired results, where do I start the next time? They typically start where they ended the last time. So that becomes “the new gold standard.” Then if we make changes again from there, typically they’ll go back to the original formula, the previous one, and make another change from that. So we can get way out of control. That’s where quality control comes in because they need to keep going back to that gold standard when they’re on paper and make sure they’re always using that as the go-to formula.
But today, with the computers and software that’s available, I’ve seen some great things. I was in a plant doing some education, walked the line the day before the education was going on. I looked at the controls and the lady had everything in the yellow. Obviously, with the green, yellow and red, you’d anticipate that green is best, yellow is in trouble and red is out of spec. I said, “You’re about to lose control.” She said, “We are perfect.” I asked what she meant. She said, “We are perfectly in control. Everything is running right at the perfect edge of spec.” I talked to her further, and she mentioned that the packaging operator, supervisor, mixers and oven and depositor operators were a team that had worked together for a long time and they knew exactly how to tweak the product so it was right at the edge of spec. It was still well in spec, but instead of going out of spec, they were keeping it there and making the most efficient product they could. The weight was good, everything else was good, but instead of running really conservatively in the green and wasting product or fuel, they were running right where they needed to be. It takes a team to do that. That one person could not do that by herself, but the whole team got together and I asked her what happened if somebody new came into the process. She said, “Then we’ve got to adjust. We’ve got to go back into the green a ways and allow for some variations.”
Spencer: Wow, that’s really interesting. I love hearing the stories of the bakers working together and understanding how they need to adjust, should someone new come into the process.
Van Laar: One thing that always surprised me is finding problems in the plant and people making adjustments. Say you have a product that’s getting a little too big in packaging. The packaging people start to adjust the equipment to make up for that larger product; they don’t always check the spec first, they just start to make minor adjustments. When the operator makes adjustments until the machine won’t take any more adjustment, they say, “We’ve got a problem here.” It shouldn’t happen that way. We should go back to root cause analysis and say, “The packaging machine did not make the product too big. It happened somewhere back in the line.” But there seems to be this huge wall sometimes between the packaging room and the mixing room. The oven is obviously the piece between that, but we don’t have enough people going back and forth between the packaging and mixing areas to understand what’s going on in the whole process.
That’s always surprised me because you can’t fix something once it’s gone past your stage of the process. One education piece we went into, the director said, “Tell the people it’s OK to dump a bad dough.” I thought that was obvious, but then I thought maybe it’s not so obvious. They want to save the numbers, so what they do is run a bad dough down the line, change the oven to try to make up for it, put it into packaging, it doesn’t meet spec, so instead of throwing away a dough, they throw away a dough’s worth of finished product in the package. That’s obviously a lot more expensive than throwing away the dough in the beginning.
Spencer: Hindsight is 20/20. When you look back on that, you see all the energy you wasted producing it into a finished product. But I also can see — and I hear this a lot — that there’s this fear of getting in trouble or being blamed for something. The natural inclination for a line worker can often be, “Let’s just try to make it work instead of calling attention to it and having to throw it out.”
Van Laar: That happens too often.
Spencer: As far as training and communication, what are the steps that bakeries can take to overcome that school of thought?
Van Laar: Working together is obviously something that must be encouraged and developed. Those teams need to have confidence in each step of the process, and they should understand more than just their area. Going back to the education piece, that’s one thing I’ve seen come out of the sessions that’s been so successful. For instance, when the person was cheating on the lay time on the dough, everybody on the line knew it was affecting them but they were helpless to do anything about it. They came back and asked about certain things they might be able to do. Later, I heard they did propose some things to management to help fix that. That team effort is required and not often enough is it fostered.
Spencer: Let’s take it back to product development. As we’re talking, it’s so obvious that every stage of the process is part of new product development. But in this particular episode, we’re focusing on the oven. It’s sort of the heartbeat or the centrifuge of the line, wouldn’t you say?
Van Laar: The product development people are, as we said earlier, developing a product that’s sat in the oven and takes the reactions from the chemistry that’s happening in the oven to get the product that’s desired. The typical process is that marketing and management want to go a certain direction, say it’s gluten-free, and they go to R&D to say, “We need you to develop this product and here are the parameters we want to see. We want it to be soft, chewy, whatever. Dark, highlighted.” Then the product development person has to go back and put ingredients into that, which react to the oven the way they need it to react to get the product. As I said earlier, the oven is a unique step in the process for us in the baking industry, and it separates us from so many other industries. We’re not just mixing. We’re mixing to get a desired effect in the oven. We get that desired effect in the oven by using the baking curve to cause those chemical reactions. We activate the yeast, then we kill the yeast; we have starch swelling; we turn water to steam to get pockets in the product. All those things are happening as the person is developing that product. Do we put soda in it or do we not? Some of those are very minor ingredients in the scope of things and we have a very specific need in the oven.
Developers also have to know what equipment is available. What are they working with? Do they have only indirect fire solid bands to work with? Do they have only rack ovens to work with? They need to consider that as they develop the process. I think equipment suppliers have done a great job, specifically more of late, to develop equipment that meets the needs that our R&D people have. We’ve seen these trends, and as I said earlier, that’s happening in the labs of the equipment manufacturers. They get to see the product development people work on a product, hear them talk about what they really need, and the engineers can get firsthand input into what we’re trying to achieve. It’s all about achieving the product that is desired by marketing and management. A lot of R&D people — and this is important too — will invent products and work on things, but if nobody buys into it, if marketing doesn’t want to produce it, if sales won’t sell it, it really doesn’t go anywhere. It could be a fantastic product, but it’s a combination of that happening plus what they know they can do in the oven.
Spencer: You answered my next question basically, but I’m going to ask it anyway. You’ve been in these conversations that I, of course, will never be privy to, but what does it look like when a team is considering a new product and how do you decide what comes first? Is it: We want to invest in our equipment, we’re going to take the next step in new technology for an oven, and what kind of products can we make with that new oven technology? Or is it: We want to develop these new products, what type of oven technology do we need? How do you decide when your equipment, specifically your oven, is sufficient for new product development? How do you know when it’s time to invest?
Van Laar: Obviously the direction of the company is paramount. Then keeping up with these trends and understanding what new equipment can do is an input to that. So in a marketing or R&D meeting, they may talk about the things they’d like to do but aren’t able to do because of equipment limitations. That’s one way that starts. The other way is replacing old equipment. One comment was made one time about having a session about the technical conference about new technology: “Why would we do that? We don’t have any new technology in our plants. Help us run this old stuff we’ve got.” So we’re going to be replacing a lot of things in the industry. I know the oven manufacturers are all busy. They’re replacing things that are old, coming out of commission. I was involved in a couple projects where we knew we had to replace an oven, but the question became: What direction were we going to do? What did we need to consider in replacing that oven? That comes from a concerted effort among all disciplines, to understand what the objective is of the company.
Spencer: It’s such a complex, staged scenario.
Van Laar: But it’s fun, Joanie! Baking is fun.
Spencer: Baking is fun, that’s for sure. Dave, these are all my questions talking about the oven. I love hearing your insight; I always learn so much from you and I love getting a refresher course on the baking curve, especially when it comes to new product innovation. As we’ve established, the oven is the mainstay of a baked product. But there are still so many new things going on and new things to learn.
Next week, we’re going to talk about data collection. That’s something relatively new in our industry, so we’ll talk about all the ways bakers can identify, collect and analyze trending information, not only for the product but also for the equipment.
And just a reminder that in our final episode, Dave will be answering audience questions. Any listener that has a question for Dave can send us an email at info@avantfoodmedia.com. Dave, I look forward to talking to you next week.