Case study: Major restaurant chain speeds delivery of its breads with new automated stretch wrapping of trays
From its Midwest regional bread preparation facility near O’Hare Airport in Chicago, a large national restaurant chain trucks unbaked loaves of bread to its many restaurants. In the facility, loaves are mixed, formed and stored in a freezer, then shipped daily to the restaurants to be baked and served. In recent years a combination of growth in the number of the chain’s restaurants and the need to meet stringent health regulations had begun to make meeting daily production more challenging. Changing how the bread is handled and installing new stretch wrap equipment has now solved the problem.
Originally, the formed loaves were placed on metal sheets and then into wheeled metal bakery cabinets for freezing. As orders were filled, the cabinets went from the freezer directly into trucks and were shipped. This depleted the number of cabinets available onsite for the next day’s bread, which became a critical problem as production increased. In addition, the cabinets had to be thoroughly washed down between uses, adding labor cost to the operation and slowing productivity.