Actual Profiling prospect:

• A Midwest Captive bakery to a no-frills bakery chain
• Serves 345 of 700 chain-wide stores
  • Illinois, Missouri, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa
• 90 employees - 120 production hours / week
• Primary bread output - Oat Bran, Wheat, Split-top wheat; White
  • Most white is out-sourced due to low-margin
• An Ingredient Supplier- used the M.O.L.E.® profiler to test his oven
  • 9 passes with iterative adjustments made “meaningful improvement”

“I was impressed by the M.O.L.E.’s ability to clarify my process”

“No-stale” program

• Captive vendor-customer relationship
• Store manager forecasts needs; orders semiweekly
• Gets measured on “stales”
• Distribution center (“we’re more efficient”) vs. route trucks
• 60,000 loaves per day
• Yield loss
  • ”not too much lost, but hate to throw anything away”
  • throw away for top too dark / sides under baked
• Cause
  • small zonal deltas lead to small yield loss
  • large zonal deltas can produce up to 50% yield loss

“Money’s tight but I think they’ll let me get it…”

Case Study – Oven Process Control

Captive Bakery – single site of a National Grocery Chain…

• QA Director took a methodical approach; started with the first of 4 ovens to be “profiled”…
• Routine established: Under 20 minutes to set up the M.O.L.E.® for a good profile
• “The oven is the heart of the baking process”…“The M.O.L.E.® helped me to quantify the process” going on inside the oven --- QA Director

Finding and fixing temperature variations led to:

• Visual product quality and consistency improvements
• Significant reduction in scrapped bread
• A stable, controlled process from which to launch further improvements…
  • “The M.O.L.E.® allows me to make incremental process improvements.” --- QA Director

Control over oven performance allowed application of the science of bread-baking:

• Knowledge of time-to-critical-temperature enabled >10% reduction in throughput time, & saved energy
• Introduction of Specialty Enzymes led to
  • Extended shelf-life (3 days to 10 days!); which led to
    • Scheduling flexibility, reduced overtime, & more efficient utilization of trucking…at the Bakery
    • Reduced scrap…at the Grocery Retailer

“The M.O.L.E.® is a verification tool.” “It is like a flashlight in the dark.” --- Plant Engineer

“ We have run multiple analyses on the bread, Bagel and Bun ovens and made significant improvements not only in quality but have saved on fuel by maximizing oven efficiencies.”

---QA Director

Process Replicability

• A regional bakery in a multinational baking enterprise, has made a significant commitment to the standardization and tightening of it’s baking process across multiple ovens in over 11 facilities.
• This is NO SURPRISE! The bakery has a long history of FIRSTS…including the first sliced bread, which all great inventions measure against!!!