Almost everyone who attended Pack Expo seemed to have an issue with their operations or a situation that needed straightening out. At least, this was the message from the exhibitors at the nation’s largest packaging trade show held recently in Chicago.
Technology moves fast, but what’s changing is the speed in which the bakeries are adapting to it out of necessity to keep their operations running efficiently and at the highest capacity possible.
The American Society of Baking (ASB) announced that Len Heflich, Tom McCurry and John Phillips are the newest members of the society’s Baking Hall of Fame (HOF) Evaluation Committee.
Everybody heard the anecdotal stories about the huge increase in demand for packaging equipment during the pandemic, but PMMI recently released a survey that documented how sales grew 40% between 2019 and 2022, noted Jorge Izquierdo, vice president, market development, PMMI, the association for packaging and processing technologies, during the recent Pack Expo held in Chicago.
“Can real artisan bread be made to scale? This is a question I get all the time from bake shops that have a handful of people to companies that employ hundreds,” said John Giacoio, vice president of sales, Rheon USA. “What they don’t understand is that this question is relative to what they are doing at the moment.”
While direct-gas-fired (DGF) ovens remain popular, they tend to require more upkeep because of the substantial number of burners. That’s why many oven experts, even manufacturers of DGF ovens, suggest turning to air-impingement ovens or convection heat to save cold, hard cash.
