How do commercial bread makers like Sara Lee and Pepperidge Farm get their loaves to turn out in a uniform size and shape every time?
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Pepperidge Farms uses math and science but Sara Lee’s methods remain a mystery. She has her own unique style that cannot be imitated, hence “Nobody does it like Sara Lee.”
Other people are talking about the consistency of manufacturing, etc., and that’s all true. But there’s one more thing to consider:
Sometimes the loaves don’t turn out the “right” shape, and they don’t get shipped to a regular grocery store. They get sold at a bakery outlet, which sells under/over-filled loaves, or sometimes ones that are just weirdly-shaped for whatever reason. When product doesn’t meet quality control, but is still edible, then it’s sold as an irregular (usually at a discount).
When I was a kid, we used to drive to the Sara Lee outlet near us and buy irregular muffins that had been over-filled. Sure, they were ugly but it was a great value proposition.
What a lot of people don’t see is the waste semi trailer filling up with bad loaves destined for animal feed, dripping with egg and flour goop. Bakeries create a lot of waste and there’s plenty of non-perfect loaves all the time, just that they don’t get released to market.
Recipes and pans. You can do it yourself. Once you dial in your recipe and method, it will be consistent. It’s really that simple.
Baking is all about precise control over ingredients and environmental conditions. In a highly controlled factory setting, they can do that to an exact science and make every batch perfectly consistent.
Dude when you make money off bread for a living the only thing you can do to up your chances of making more money is A) putting food into your bread. B) making perfect bread.
Take a look at the ingredient list. The stabilizers are used to improve machinery possessing and add shelf life. I worked 25 years in a bakery called Automatic Rolls. It is chemically engineered.
If you made a million of them every day for years and years, you’d be pretty consistent at it too.
I’m a Computer Systems Engineer for a major bread manufacturer in the US and answer to this question is easy. But most people don’t realize how strict standards are which makes the real answer to this question very complicated
The ELI5 answer is they use the same ingredients in the same amounts on the same machines at the same speed and same temperatures always. Consistency at all parts of the process is how this is done at scale.
Nowadays there’s more than just getting your bread to be the same size and shape. Some vendors may require a certain height, color and weight of a hamburger bun for instance with a certain amount of sesame seeds per square inch on top. I deploy systems that integrate with the PLC’s on the machine and many other instruments like scales, cameras, and a wide array of sensors and that’s how we ensure that our product is at or above spec at all times. It’s actually pretty crazy!
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_loaf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_loaf)
The bread is standardized in bread pans. The Pullman loaf was the popular name for standardized bread during the age of rail. The dining car of the train was small and used these compact loaves.
A ‘diner’ that sells Pullman sized toast, eggs and coffee was originally just the train kitchen parked on the ground.
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