Blog: Gentler handling improves bread quality without extra costs

Constant downward pressure on costs while maintaining quality is a challenge familiar to most plant bakers. Many will also have been asked to increase quality and consistency without increasing costs. Regulators and consumer groups add to the difficulties by demanding fewer and/or less additives.

Conventionally, achieving any one of these objectives usually means compromising on one or both of the others. Improved quality generally requires better flour and more additives; reducing ingredient costs invariably leads to lower quality.

Baker Perkins’ Multitex4™ moulder changes all that. The multi-roller design is based on research into dough rheology, which shows that minimising stress on the dough pieces as they are moulded into their final shapes improves quality. The Multitex4™ has changed the process to maximise development of the protein in standard flour and give bakers a clear choice between improving quality without extra cost, or cutting ingredient expenditure with no automatic reduction in quality.

Quality is defined by cell count, volume, colour, softness and resistance to tearing. The conventional way of improving these is to use expensive, high-protein flour, more improvers, or a longer process. The Multitex4™ builds more structure from the same ingredients by handling the dough more gently.

Whether your objective is to improve quality, reduce costs or minimise additives, the Multitex4™ provides a convincing alternative to changing the recipe. Eliminating the trade-off between cost and quality takes away the headaches caused by conflicting priorities and also increases plant versatility. With simple recipe changes, a single line can produce everything from standard to premium quality bread, all while keeping costs under control.

These are pretty sizeable claims. But we can back them with evidence - they are proven in production environments around the world. Next time you are asked to achieve the impossible, just contact us.