Today’s consumers lead busy lives, which sometimes means eating on-the-run. Fortunately, many bakeries are offering convenient grab-and-go breakfast items like muffins and donuts.
Labriola Baking Co., an automated/artisan bakery in Alsip, Ill., seems to be expanding constantly, thanks to the efforts of ‘Chief Dough Boy’ and CEO Rich Labriola and his staff. Business has grown at double-digit rates, allowing for a move to a spacious, 175,000-sq.ft. production facility and the opening of a hot-spot bakery café. It’s latest project? Pretzel bread.
Fun and food go hand in hand, especially at Nation Pizza and Foods. With more than 60 years of experience in the baking and prepared foods business, this manufacturer/contract packager/recipe creator is an expert at crafting frozen pizzas, pizza crusts, sandwiches, appetizers, cookies, bread sticks and a variety of sweets at its two U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) facilities at rates of more than 2 million pieces daily.
The six-day fair in Munich showcased a wide product spectrum for the baking and confectionery sector, with more than 1,100 exhibitors that transformed the Messe München exhibit hall into ‘the world’s largest bakery.’
Axium Foods, known best for private-label, corn-based snacks, launches its own brand of enhanced-nutrition tortilla chips of a different color, Mystic Harvest Purple Corn Tortilla Chips. Loaded with healthful antioxidants, the chips are not only eye-catching, they have a tasty flavor and crunch.
Pork rinds are probably the most misunderstood item in the snack category. This is surprising, because people have been eating pork rinds—also called pork skins—as long as they have been eating pigs. One of the world’s first snack foods created thousands of years ago, and favored in the southern states, pork rinds are a simple combination of fried pork skins and salt.
The baking and snack food industries have been rife with acquisitions, mergers, spinoffs and other activities this year. So much so, that it’s sometimes difficult to tell who the major players are. Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery’s Top Bakers and Top Snack Manufacturers lists help put it all into perspective.
Axium Foods’ 130,000-sq.-ft, corn-based snacks operation in South Beloit, Ill., has expanded several times, thanks in part to the success of the many private-label products it packs and products it copacks. It’s also launching its own line of Mystic Harvest purple tortilla chips, which contain powerful antioxidants. Outfitted with seven highly flexible production lines, Axium produces 150 different stock-keeping units of snacks each week.