Meyer`s Bakeries business in Hope, Ark., and

2006 Wholesale Baker of the Year
Running Down a
DREAM
Harlan Bakeries specializes
in producing almost any
grain-based food that its
in-store, foodservice and
private label clients can dream
up. As a result, its sales top
$250 million, a tenfold
increase over the last decade.
Now, the nimble company is
chasing a dream of its own,
and that’s to become an
even bigger and better
baking company.
Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery - SEPTEMBER 2006
By Dan Malovany
t seems like decades ago for brothers Hugh and Doug Harlan, but
in reality, it was only a few years back when frozen unbaked and
fully baked bagels made up between 70% and 80% of the company’s sales. In those days, calling on a potential client was a fairly
simple, if not direct, process.
Through strategic acquisitions and internal growth since 2000,
Harlan Bakeries has transformed itself from a specialty bagel producer
into a major, diversified wholesale baking operation with a full line of
products ranging from frozen breads, pies, cakes and other desserts to
frozen muffins, cookie dough and, yes, bagels for its contract manufacturer customers, hundreds of in-store bakeries and thousands of national foodservice operations.
“We have a clear definition of the three channels of distribution that
we compete in, and we have aligned our team members to better serve
those channels of distribution,” notes Joseph Latouf, executive vice
president of sales and marketing.
Perhaps its boldest move was the 2005 purchase of the assets of
Meyer’s Bakeries business in Hope, Ark., and Wichita, Kan. Purchased
I
Heading up Harlan’s management team
are (top) Dennis Daniel, COO, and
Joseph Latouf, executive vice president,
sales & marketing, (middle)
Hal P. Harlan, executive vice president,
and Paul Hayden, CFO, (bottom)
Doug Harlan, executive vice president,
and Hugh Harlan, president.
Photo by Marta Garcia
2006 Wholesale Baker of the Year
AT A GLANCE
Company: Harlan Bakeries Inc.
Headquarters: Avon, Ind.
Est. Annual Sales: More than $250 million
Products: Frozen unbaked, par-baked and fully baked bagels; fruit,
meringue, cream, and spin crust pies; cakes; baked cookies and raw
cookie dough; pre-deposited muffins, breadsticks, English muffins,
brown ‘n’ serve dinner rolls, assorted buns and rolls
Major Channels of Distribution: In-store bakeries, foodservice chains,
contract manufacturing
No. of Plants: Six. Avon, Ind.; Indianapolis, Ind; Denver, Colo.; Hope,
Ark.; Wichita, Kan., and a joint venture with Apple Valley Foods in
Kentville, Nova Scotia. The company also has facilities in Golden, Colo.,
and Lafayette, Ind., where it can install lines for added production.
No. of Employees: 1,600, company-wide
KEY PERSONNEL
President: Hugh P. Harlan
Executive V.P.: Doug H. Harlan
Executive V.P.: Hal P. Harlan
COO: Dennis E. Daniels
CFO: Paul G. Hayden
Exec. V.P., Sales & Marketing: Joseph E. Latouf
by its subsidiary, Southern Bakeries, LLC, Harlan’s acquisition of
the $60 million operation last year added thousands of muchneeded stock-keeping units (SKUs) to Harlan’s product portfolio
— everything from brown ‘n’ serve dinner rolls to breadsticks,
hearth rolls, English muffins, energy bars and conventional hamburger and hot dog buns. In addition to private label, the business also sells baked goods under the Nature’s Grain brand.
“It’s making us more of a one-stop shop,” says Dennis
Daniels, Harlan’s chief operating officer. “It also allows us to
anchor some of the existing customers that we had shared with
Meyer’s. It makes us a stronger supplier to them.”
In addition, Southern Bakeries now operates Meyer’s extensive fresh distribution, which is much more complex than
Harlan’s line of frozen, longer shelf life baked goods that are
shipped via foodservice distributors and other carriers. Overall,
fresh sales account for 15-20% of the company’s business.
“We have it set as a stand-alone separate business,” explains
Doug Harlan, executive vice president. “We want to understand
the business better before we do a full integration. There are a lot
of complexities that were new to us on the fresh side and getting
a good understanding of that operating facility.”
Initially, Harlan poured in millions of dollars in capital expenditures to retool the aging Hope plant and to provide the new
pans and griddles that have enhanced the bakery’s product quality and consistency. As a result of its efforts, the Hope plant
received a superior rating from the American Institute of Baking
after an audit of the operation earlier this year.
Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery - SEPTEMBER 2006
Southern Bakeries also pared
down the number of SKUs it produces and streamlined its list
of customers to ensure that it
strengthens the operation,
albeit smaller in volume than
before, and its bottom line.
Masters of Reinvention
Like many successful businesses, Harlan Bakeries has reinvented
itself since it was founded 15 years ago to
respond to shifting consumer trends and restructuring
its business model to reflect changes in the competitive climate.
Founded by the Harlan brothers and their father, Hal, in
1991, the company initially was known throughout parts of the
Midwest for its “Bigger Better Bagels” in the freezer case. Harlan
Bakeries added to its regional retail business and began a path of
rapid, double-digit growth by producing products for some of the
nation’s largest foodservice chains and retail shops.
Since 1997, combined annual sales have risen tenfold to more
than $250 million. At the same time, the number of employees
has risen from 200 to more than 1,600. Not surprisingly, the
company has been one of the fastest-growing businesses in
Indiana for more than a decade. In fact, it has received Indiana’s
Growth 100 Award from the Johnson Center for
Entrepreneurship & Innovation, a center within Indiana
University’s Kelly School of Business, for the past 11 consecutive
years. Because of its innovation and sustainable growth, Snack
Food & Wholesale Bakery magazine named Harlan Bakeries our
2006 Wholesale Baker of the Year.
Harlan Bakeries has relied on a number of strategic acquisitions of small- to mid-scale wholesale baking companies to propel sales and broaden its ability to serve national accounts. In
2000, the company bought Kyger Bakery, Inc., a Midwestern
producer of cakes, pie shells, and meringue and cream pies with a
45,000-sq.-ft. semi-automated plant in Lafayette, Ind. Simply by
leveraging its new line of desserts against its existing customer
base, Harlan Bakeries tripled the business to more than $20 million in less than two years. Today, sweet goods make up between
25% and 30% of the company’s combined annual revenues.
To better serve its burgeoning base of in-store, foodservice and
private label customers with frozen pies, cakes and other desserts,
Harlan Bakeries shut down the Lafayette plant this year and
replaced it with a 160,000-sq.-ft. state-of-the-art facility in
Indianapolis that’s much closer to its Avon headquarters, allowing the company to leverage synergies between operations and
the corporate staff.
That facility now houses three automated lines that produce
an expanded line of more upscale desserts that garnered the bakery 12 awards at the American Pie Council/Crisco National Pie
Hugh Harlan, president, and Doug Harlan,
executive vice president, are the driving force
behind Harlan Bakeries, SF&WB’s 2006 Wholesale
Baker of the Year.
Championships this spring.
In addition, Harlan moved its predeposited muffin and cookie dough operations from Avon to Indianapolis to consolidate all of its baked sweet goods production under one roof. (See “Hitting the
Sweet Spot.”)
“We have improved the quality of our
sweet goods quite a bit,” Hugh Harlan
says. “But then again, we were previously
selling the products at a price point we had
to hit. We have upgraded the quality, but
we haven’t gone to the full gourmet path.”
Moreover, in the sweet goods category,
the company is a partner with Apple
Valley Foods, a Kentville, Nova Scotia,
producer of fruit pies and other baked
sweet goods. Initially, Harlan Bakeries
planned to shuttle pie production between
its two sweet goods plants to offer customers a full line of products. However,
with skyrocketing oil and energy prices
along with the strengthening of the
Canadian dollar, the companies scuttled
that idea, for the most part. Today, the
Nova Scotia operation focuses on serving
the Canadian market. Only about 20% of
its volume goes to U.S. customers.
“So far, business is going well up north
of the border. The joint venture just completed a capital expansion project that
substantially increased capacity in its
Canadian operations,” Hugh Harlan says.
Additionally, producing more premium
positioned products is paying off.
“Regular pie consumption appears to
be trending down, whereas gourmet pies
appear to be trending up,” Latouf notes.
“Sugar-free and no-sugar added pies are
trending up as people deal with issues like
the glycemic index and reducing sugar in
their diet.”
To avoid seasonal dips, the bakery
relies on summer pies, such as key lime
and cream varieties, as well as the angel
food and cream cakes that are popular
during the warmer months.
“We’re growing our cake business and
a couple other items, such as the sliced
cake category and the angel food category,” Latouf says.
Like the pie category, the bagel industry has had its challenges, but Harlan
Bakeries continues to gain share in this
market as the number of bagel producers
consolidates and it gains market share in
the three distribution channels it serves.
Over the past few years, because of rising
overhead coupled with a price-sensitive
category, several mid-sized bagel manufacturers have exited the business, leaving the
doors open for the Harlan Bakeries’ more
efficient operations to fill the vacuum.
“There are fewer competitors today
than there were three years ago,” Latouf
explains. “Bagel consumption is relatively
flat. Decreases in consumption in the
freezer case are being offset by increases in
the fresh bakery aisle.”
Likewise, bagel sales in the foodservice
channel are flat, with volume shifting
among the various quick-serve chains as
the competitive environment changes and
companies roll out new products.
Harlan Bakeries, however, has been
able to weather the winds of change in the
bagel category. Its 260,000-sq.-ft. plant in
Avon is probably one of the most efficient,
low-cost producers of bagels in the nation.
Each day, the operation cranks out 2.5 to
3 million unbaked, par-baked and fully
baked frozen bagels ranging from 1 oz. to
5 oz. in size. The workhorse’s three dedicated lines have 40 pockets of dividing
capacity, including a new 8-pocket divider
and makeup system, to produce unbaked
bagels. The frozen bagel lines also support
the plant’s three baked bagel operations.
Additionally, Harlan recently installed a
mini-bagel line.
Despite several expansions of its efficient Avon operation, which more than
doubled its size over the last five years,
the need for even more bagel capacity is
an ongoing challenge for the company.
Its Southern Bakeries unit, for instance,
has lines that produce bagels for its customer base. To better serve its West Coast
customers, Harlan purchased A.C.E.
Baking Co., a Denver, Colo., bagel producer, in 2002. A.C.E., Hugh Harlan
notes, was a “really nice acquisition”
because most of its systems were similar
to those at the Avon plant. Such compatibility allows the two operations to produce more consistent products, which is of
SEPTEMBER 2006 - Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery
Photo courtesy of Harlan Bakeries
Photo by Marta Garcia
2006 Wholesale Baker of the Year
2006 Wholesale Baker of the Year
critical importance to many of
its national customers.
Additionally, the company is
looking to add even more capacity as it consolidates its position
as one of the leading producers
of bagels in the nation.
The Quiet Growth Channel
One of Harlan’s fastest-growing
channels is contract manufacturing, due to confidentiality
agreements, the company does
not discuss in any detail about
what it’s doing. However, Hugh
Harlan does note that contract
manufacturing accounts for about onethird of its sales, and if several projects
come to fruition, they should propel its
annual revenue to above the $300 million
mark in 2007.
As with the bagel and other parts of
baking industry, the changing competitive landscape and shifting business
models have created growth opportunities for Harlan Bakeries. In some cases,
manufacturing capacity — especially for
the production of innovative, hard-toautomate products — is shrinking in the
baking industry.
“You’re seeing some companies getting
out of self-manufacturing, and some larger companies are really trying to focus on
just building their brands,” Hugh Harlan
says. “They want their name and logo on
the new product to build their brand, but
they are really not interested in spending
capital to produce it.”
Tying it all Together
When Dennis Daniels met the Harlan brothers about a decade ago, the latter were running a respectable bagel business with a single plant. Today,
Harlan Bakeries owns five facilities in the United States that produce hundreds of baked goods, as well a joint venture with a pie producer in Canada.
As its new chief operating officer, Daniels’ job is to pull the organization together, restructure the management team, expand the company’s strategic initiatives and manage the day-to-day operations of the
multi-facility business.
“I’ve worked at everything from the shop floor to being CEO of a
business,” says Daniels, whose previous experience includes being
equity partner of a food manufacturing company called Harmony Foods
and president and CEO of Pioneer Frozen Foods, a Dallas-based refrigerated and frozen dough producer. “I’ve been in every area of business,
from manufacturing to sales,” he says.
Over the years, Daniels has crossed paths with Hugh and Doug Harlan,
who founded Harlan Bakeries with their father, Hal, in 1991, a couple of
times. He admires the Harlans for their innovative approach to the operations part of business and as “hard workers who will make things happen.”
“The Harlan family is very detailed-oriented,” Daniels notes. “They’re
aggressive, and they’re willing to take risks. They’re very involved in the busi-
Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery - SEPTEMBER 2006
Harlan Bakeries’ ability to
take product concepts from the
test kitchen and find a way to
automate them in a timely manner has sparked growth in this
expanding and lucrative business
channel. It has a knack for massproducing products that others
dream up.
“We’re very flexible in developing processes and systems,” Doug
Harlan says. “As everybody
knows, things change very quickly
in this industry, so being flexible is
a strength in this market.”
In some cases, Harlan
Bakeries developed patented processes to
automate processes of products that are
not that easy to produce commercially.
Moreover, the company has the old
Lafayette, Ind., facility and a plant in
Golden, Colo., where it can ramp up production in a short period of time.
“Over the last few years, we’ve been
seeing a trend in the industry where companies have a lot of new product ideas,
and if there is capacity out there, some-
ness, specifically with new customer development. They know how to find
those opportunities and how to commercialize them at a high rate of speed.”
Over the years, the company has grown in leaps and bounds through
acquisitions and internal growth. This year, for instance, Harlan Bakeries
reorganized its sweet goods operations. This summer, it opened a 160,000sq.-ft. frozen pie and dessert plant in Indianapolis, Ind. In addition, the
company continues to integrate the 2005 acquisition of the assets of
Meyer’s Bakeries’ Hope, Ark., and Wichita, Kan. operations into its overall
business, and it’s looking at two or three major capital projects for 2007.
“We’ve been very busy with the growth side of the business, so we
needed someone with the expertise at pulling everything together to get us
where we want to be and handle the continued growth,” says Doug Harlan,
executive vice president. “At the same time, we’re looking to consolidate
overhead and find ways to help us grow internally and externally. So, we
want to make sure we have the right team in place to manage this growth.”
Add in a host of regulatory, legislative, human resource and other
requirements, and it’s easy to see how the Harlan brothers can get a bit
distracted — if not overwhelmed — by the daily duties of running a
much more complex business.
“We’re a smaller family business that has grown up, and we need
the structure to maintain our growth,” Doug Harlan adds. “We needed
someone to take over the day-to-day operating pieces of the business
so that we can focus on the long term growth strategies.”
2006 Wholesale Baker of the Year
times they’ll use that capacity versus building additional capacity in their plants,”
Hugh Harlan adds. “We’re a specialty
manufacturer who also happens to be
expanding and supporting our current
product lines. On specialty manufacturing,
we can get to the market very quickly.
We’ve built some lines here in just a matter of months where some other companies may take a year to build them.”
Daniels notes that the Harlan brothers
are adept at identifying emerging trends
and developing new business opportunities.
“If they see a piece of business that
may not be a core competency today, they
will still pursue it,” he notes. “They’re
innovative from both an operations standpoint and a product standpoint.”
In life, there are dreamers, and there
are people who turn their dreams into
reality. In the baking industry, Harlan has
built its own dream business by making
the dreams of others come true. SF&WB
New Strategies for a New Era
At one time, personal relationships were the basis of business relationships. How well you knew
someone often determined how strong your business was together.
Today, conducting sales the old-fashioned way is not enough, especially in a performance-driven world.
“It’s all about delivering the right product at the right time and at the right cost,” says Joseph
Latouf, executive vice president of sales and marketing for Harlan Bakeries. That’s especially
true with contract manufacturing, which, along with in-store bakery and national account foodservice, makes up Harlan’s three major channels of distribution and it’s about helping your customer reach their profit or performance target. Over the last three years, the Avon, Ind.-based
company fine-tuned its go-to-market strategies in each of its distribution channels.
Unlike the old days, Latouf notes, business now is more transparent for all parties involved.
Harlan’s customers are looking for long-term partnerships where everything from the cost of ingredients to the margin on the product is outlined in detail in a contract. If the price of commodities
changes significantly, for example, the price of the product can go up or down accordingly.
“In our business with contract manufacturing customers, we want to ensure that everything is
outlined in the contract so that there are no surprises or disappointments on either side of the
table,” Latouf says. “As real costs increase or decrease, pricing is adjusted accordingly.”
SEPTEMBER 2006 - Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery
2006 Wholesale Baker of the Year
French vanilla cakes come
out of the oven at Harlan
Bakeries’ new sweet goods
facility in Indianapolis.
Hitting the
SWEET SPOT
Photos by Marta Garcia
By Dan Malovany
Harlan Bakeries recently finished outfitting
a state-of-the-art, 160,000-sq.-ft. plant
with three pie lines and a cookie and
muffin operation. What’s next? How
about further automation and even
more expansion?
or Jim Kyger, whose family
bakery had been producing
pies for more than 30 years,
life was as sweet as it can be …
at least in the baking industry.
While the competition was pushing production and racing to the limits, Kyger
ran his 45,000-sq.-ft. bakery in Lafayette,
Ind., at his own pace.
“He only ran one shift of production,” notes Hugh Harlan,
president of Harlan Bakeries. “He ran 8 hours a day. That’s all
he was going to do, and he was happy with it.”
In 2000, Harlan Bakeries purchased Kyger, which specialized
in crème and meringue pies, but also produced some brownies
and angel food cake for a limited customer base. With the new
owner, life in the sleepy bakery picked up in a hurry.
“We had the vision to go in there and run three shifts,
F
Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery - SEPTEMBER 2006
2006 Wholesale Baker of the Year
The Indianapolis bakery’s spin crust line can produce up to 80 pies a minute, depending on the complexity
of the product. Here, the bakery is producing banana crème pies.
which we did within a year,” Harlan
recalls. “We sold the facility out.”
What Harlan Bakeries did was successfully penetrate the in-store bakery market,
sell pies into the foodservice channel and
pick up some contract-manufacturing customers who were seeking the sweet goods
that the old Kyger plant produced.
Additionally, there were perfect synergies with Harlan Bakery’s joint venture
with Apple Valley Foods of Kentville, Nova
Scotia. Kyger’s line of crème and meringue
pies nicely complemented the fruit pies
made by the Canadian operations.
“We were able to take the crème and
meringue pies to our existing customer
base, and it grew faster than we expected,” Harlan says. “We thought we would
be able to ramp up sales and it would
take us a couple years to get a couple
shifts, but within six months, we were so
out of capacity. We were saying, ‘Uh, oh.
What did we do?’”
Initially, Harlan Bakeries explored
automating the process and expanding in
Lafayette, where production was semiautomated, with all of the components of
the pies made in batches. Unfortunately,
there wasn’t enough square footage
around the landlocked facility to add a
state-of-the-art makeup system and a
longer tunnel oven to drive capacity in the
long run.
Instead, the company turned its attention to Indianapolis, and why not? From its
headquarters in Avon, Ind., a suburb of
Indianapolis, Lafayette is a 90-minute drive
by car. After a short search of commercial
property nearby, Harlan Bakeries found a
paper trimming plant that is only 20 minutes from its headquarters and perfectly fits
its needs for today, as well as for the future.
“The big key is that we have 34 acres
there with the building, so we have plenty
of room for expansion,” Harlan says.
It’s a good thing Harlan Bakeries has
the extra room. Even before the plant was
fully operational, the company added on
to the facility, which now stands at
160,000 sq. ft. The bakery added two
110,000-lb. flour silos, as well as bulk
tanks for soy and fructose. It also recently
installed a kettle system for precooking its
fruit fillings. On the contrary, its
Canadian bakery uses uncooked fruit fillings as its preferred process.
More than 25 products are made at
the Indianapolis bakery; the facility houses two baked pie lines, one with an 80-ft.
tunnel oven and the other with an 85-ft.
oven. Both lines can produce between 60
and 100 pies a minute, depending on the
product. They also produce a variety of
thaw-and-sell, sugar-free crème cakes,
which come in banana nut, chocolate and
lemon flavors. Other cake products
include sliced crème cakes, sugar-free
sliced crème cakes and white, lemon and
Hugh Harlan, president of Harlan Bakeries, explains to Dan Malovany, SF&WB’s editor, how the company
just installed systems to pre-cook fruit fillings for its pies.
SEPTEMBER 2006 - Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery
2006 Wholesale Baker of the Year
strawberry angel food cakes. During
Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery’s visit
this summer, the bakery was making
French vanilla loaf cake.
In addition, the facility has a spin
crust line that produces products such as
a key lime pie with a graham cracker
crust and chocolate silk with a crumbled
cookie crust. In addition to crème pies,
the line cranks out Kyger’s signature
meringue pies. Line speeds range from 70
to 80 pieces a minute, again depending
on the complexity of the product.
Overall, the bakery is running three
shifts on its cake lines and two to three
shifts on its other ones.
Unlike producing bagels, which Harlan
Bakeries is an expert at, pie production
can be more complicated, especially on
those products that have a lot of components. In addition, placing cakes in
upscale dome packaging often requires
some manual labor before the packages
are shrink-wrapped and automatically
case-packed.
“We’ve had to do a lot of tying of systems together to automate the process,”
Harlan explains. “Not only are you baking the crusts, you’re filling them and then
topping them and then sending them
through packaging. There’s a lot of timing
that goes into the process. There are also
a lot of moving parts here, unlike when
we’re producing bagels.”
For product safety and consistency, all
desserts are check-weighed and released for
distribution, but only after microbiological
testing. In addition, the bakery has
installed X-ray machines to check for both
metal and non-metal pieces in the product.
In many ways, the Indianapolis plant
is the company’s U.S. sweet goods operation. Harlan Bakeries moved its muffin
and cookie lines from its Avon facility to
this facility not only to consolidate all
sweet goods production under one roof,
but to also free up much-needed space at
its flagship plant, which produces
between 2.5 and 3 million bagels a day,
plus other contract manufactured products. The plant also has rack ovens for
short-run items, two spiral freezers and a
spiral cooler.
Expect more capital investments to
come soon for its sweet goods operation.
In the packaging area, Harlan Bakeries is
adding more casepackers, and it’s looking
to add a robotic palletizer to streamline
the warehouse operations.
As for expanding the plant once again,
that’s in the works, as well.
“I’ve already been working on drawing
up the plans for the next project that we’ll
be working on,” Harlan says.
Adding more capacity. That’s a sweet
situation to be in. SF&WB
Bagels
by the
MILLIONS
arlan Bakeries’ 260,000-sq-ft. plant in Avon, Ind., is a welloiled machine. Production at the plant runs 24 hours a day,
five to six days a week. Each week, the bakery produces millions of bagels, ranging from 1-oz. minis to 5-oz. pieces and everything from soft or chewy ones to plain and everything varieties.
To keep the bakery running, Harlan uses a predictive maintenance software program to schedule what projects should be
repaired or replaced on the weekend. The bakery has invested millions of dollars in adding redundant systems to minimizing downtime. It’s also installed back-up mixers, air compressors, flour silos,
flour sifters and ammonia compressors for its freezer.
H
Harlan Bakeries’ flagship plant in Avon, Ind., produces millions of bagels each week.
Photos by Marta Garcia
Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery - SEPTEMBER 2006
2006 Wholesale Baker of the Year
The company even put in a large generator that can run the plant and holding
freezer in case of a power outage. With
the larger holding freezer, Harlan can’t
afford to be without power for a prolonged period.
On average, the bakery uses about 1.2
million lb. of flour each week. Flour is
stored in five, 110,000-lb. silos, with two
more in storage to meet future capacity.
Harlan also has added a rail spur that
holds up to 10, 200,000-lb. carloads of
flour at a time. The plant houses a liquid
sugar system, as well. Minor and micro
ingredients are pre-batched in a premix
room. In accordance with good manufacturing practices (GMP), Harlan Bakeries
segregates allergen-based materials from
point of receipt through to finished product distribution.
To monitor production, the bakery
uses a computer system with supervisory
controls to monitor time, temperatures,
cripples, amount of flour used, scheduling
and more. At critical control points
throughout the plant, computers housed
in protective, blue SPC stations allow
operators to download production and
quality control information. The network
provides an airtight system that tracks
production from logging lot numbers of
ingredients to using bar-coding to monitor
the storage and distribution of final products. The system allows for total product
recall capability. The bakery conducts a
mock product recall every three months.
Throughout the process, operators, not
lab technicians, monitor quality control.
It’s all part of the bakery’s accredited
Hazard Analysis and Critical Control
Points (HACCP) program. However, the
bakery has a quality-control laboratory
that conducts shelf-life tests and bakes off
The Avon plant cranks out unbaked, parbaked and fully baked bagels ranging from 1 oz. to 5 oz. in size.
samples of products the next day. It also
does microbial inspection of equipment to
ensure proper sanitation.
Overall, production of par-baked and
fully baked frozen bagels is located at one
end of the plant, while frozen unbaked
bagels are produced at the other. All production flows toward the center, which houses a
massive cooling and packaging room.
On the frozen unbaked bagel line, five
2,000-lb. over-tilt mixers are needed to
feed the line. The central HVAC keeps
the dough makeup departments at 72ϒF
year-round.
After mixing, dough batches ranging
from 1,800 to 2,400 lb. are dumped into
troughs, which are elevated up to the
divider hoppers. In all, the three lines can
produce 40 bagels at a time, or about
8,500 dozen bagels an hour. The doughballs travel on finger conveyors and converge at the intermediate proofer before
resting for about 10 to 12 minutes. They
then drop into a vertical bagel former sys-
tem. Here, the pieces fall from the intermediate proofer through tubular chutes
similar to those found on tortilla lines.
Afterward, the formed products are conveyed to a spiral proofer. Because the bakery co-packs for major foodservice chains,
the process from proofing and retarding
to blast freezing is proprietary at the
request of the Harlans.
After the bagels are frozen, they’re
packaged in a manner more reminiscent
of cookies or salted snacks than bakery
products. Frozen pieces are dumped in a
packaging bin and then elevated up fourby-four aligners and dumped in one of
five scaler/counters. Thirty pieces drop
into form/fill/seal bags, which are heatsealed, pass through metal detection and
are loaded four to a case, which was automatically assembled. The packaging room
also houses bulk packing systems. After
labeling and tape sealing, the cartons are
robotically palletized, shrink-wrapped and
conveyed to the holding freezer. SF&WB
Reprinted with permission from Snack Food and Wholesale Bakery September 2006