Opening an artisan bakery - have questions
I have found a 900 square feet space in a good location for an Artisan Bakery. It has a 400 square feet store front in addition to the bakery.
I bought an Alto Shaam proofing oven and a Rational Combination Oven, along with a lot of other great stuff. I have gotten a lot of the equipment at auctions and I have gotten great deals.
I have been baking as a personal chef for clients for 10 years and look forward to scaling up to real production.
My main question is what is the maximum capacity in loaves of a 900 square foot working space, assuming an 8 hour work day with 2 people working?
How much ingredients storage will I need?
What is the best ingredients scale for this size operation?
I believe I have thought of everything, but I know I haven't! Production bakers please tell me what I have overlooked in my planning, as I move from a small scale baker to production baker.
I have some experience in production planning for other types of goods. I suggest you try to figure out what you production bottleneck is likely to be; i.e the thing that caps your capacity. As a hypothetical example, if you can bake a maximum of 24 loaves at a time and they take an hour per bunch, your capacity over 8 hours is 192 loaves, and only if you start baking at minute 1. So, it doesn't matter if you can mix and proof 500 loaves per day; you'd only need to have space to stock enough ingredients for 192 loaves per day times the number of days between purchases, plus some safety stock.
Makes a fine point. First and foremost how much of your day would you like spent baking off loaves? Then how many can actually be baked in that time frame based simply on oven capacity. Now you have your max potential. Now consider how many employees you have or plan to have. How many hands will it take to make the max number? I've seen bakeries that size crank out over quite a bit of bread but staffing was large and the oven had a large capacity (60-90 loaves per bake pending shape/size). Then the final question how many loaves do you need to make. A balance among these should get you to a good starting point for production
Josh
Thank you Arjon and Josh. With the equipment we envision, i.e. ovens, proofing ovens, etc. We believe the physical capacity of the space and equipment is around 200 loaves a day, assuming 2 bakers and a helper doing 4 bakes.
I guess the original question needs to be refined to "How many loaves can we potentially produce that are highest quality bread in the start up months? Of course after a couple years of practice I am sure we can make all 200 loaves perfectly, but in the beginning when we are learning the quirks of the layout, the equipment and the process how much utilization of the bakery as equipped would be a prudent target volume?
We believe that you only get one chance to make a first impression with your bread, and we want that first impression to be terrific.
Thanks again,
Karen
as you have more factors to consider. To expand on my very simplified example, if you're baking breads that have two different baking times, that has to be factored in. So do things like whether you plan to have everyone working together vs. partially overlapping hours and'or split shits. And I haven't even mentioned any other parts of the process aside from actually baking the loaves.
I suspect the only way to be fully confident as to how many quality loaves you can produce is to do as many trial days as necessary to establish and tweak your production process to minimize non-productive time and to make sure the results meet your standards.
You don't need a big space if you are well organized. Mark Sinclair used to post quite a bit here and has a trailer that is a fully outfitted kitchen. You can look at a number of his YouTube videos to see him in action and the layout of the trailer. Biggest thing you will confront is the organization as noted in other posts.
It doesn't matter if you have a large walk-in retarder, a giant mixer, a huge oven, etc. What will matter even with all these things available (a dream, I know), is how to schedule all of your tasks so that they don't overlap with each other. For example you may have a few formulas that work perfectly as is. But you may then find that you can't possibly keep the formula and methodology the same to accommodate the need for the oven if something else is ready to bake. You may have to work out a schedule whereby you need to adjust your formulas to match component (manpower or machine) to availability. And also to match your customer commitments. It is probably no easy trick.
Here is a post I composed in another thread.
I am not a professional baker and do not work in a bakery.
The O.P. was thinking about proofing overnight. There will be blocks of time when the product is either proofing or baking with no involvement by a human.
You should decide on a bread menu, perhaps just yeasted French bread to start with. Are you going to offer rolls as well as loaves? Sourdough will be an entirely different kettle of fish, so maybe that's in the future?
I went through this as an exercise last year. Paramount in any manufacturing operation (you are manufacturing bread) is to manage your time and personnel. Make up a production schedule. Use a spreadsheet program such as Excel or (free) OpenOffice.org. How many employees are there and how many shifts? When does the bakery open and when does it close? When do the employees come and go and eat? Is the bakery open weekends and how will you cover them? If your employees are non-exempt you will have to take any overtime into account in their scheduling. In addition to scheduling your employees you will need to schedule your mixing, proofing, scaling, shaping and bake times. You will need to scale your output to sales. You need to do this so your employees will be in and out without excessive overtime and so they get a meal period. Check the wage & hour laws in your jurisdiction. If it's just you and the owner working 12- or 16-hour days, 7 days per week, you're going to burn out sooner or later.
Based on a 7 am open time, your first bake will need to be finished by, say, 6:30 am, then let the bread cool and put it out for the first customers at 7 am. That means your first bake will start around 5:30 am. If your first shift starts at 5 am, you will have 1/2 hour to preheat and load the ovens. With the bake finished at 6:30 am, you can then start mixing the next day's dough, then scaling, shaping and proofing. You can take a meal break while the dough is proofing, then load the proofed dough into the fridge for tomorrow's bake. So maybe something like this:
5:00 am -- preheat and load ovens
5:30 am - 6:30 am -- First bake
6:30 am -- cool and put out loaves
7:00 am -- bakery opens, proof yeast and mix tomorrow's dough
8:00 am -- scaling and shaping
9::00 am -- Lunch time and begin proofing
10:00 am -- Proof yeast and begin mixing your second bread, assuming there are two breads on the menu
11:00 am - scale and shape second bread
12:00 noon -- end of proofing first bread, load first bread into refrigerator for overnight hold, begin proofing second bread
3:00 pm -- end of proofing second bread, load into refrigerator for overnight hold
3:30 pm -- you've now put in 10 1/2 hours
And that's just for bread. It will have to be interleaved with pastry and other bakery products.
There will be blocks of time when you're just waiting for the dough to proof. Such is the baking business.
There should be at least two mixers and two ovens on the premises for two reasons: a) to accomodate your regular production, and b) for redundancy. If your mixer or oven conks out and you have no redundancy, you're out of production and will have no product to sell. You may as well close shop and you won't make any money that day.
What happens to the surplus/unsold product? That's more the owner's worry, as is insurance.
I wouldn't fuss too much about the nuances of your product at first. Focus on getting saleable products into the store for sale to your customers. Finesse comes after you've got that down.
Make sure you have enough sheet pans to handle all those loaves.
Out of curiosity, what are the interior dimensions of your oven and how many decks/levels does it have? How many sheets/loaves could you fit in it at a time?
Thank you for all the comments thus far.
The combi oven will take 3 sheet pans 18" x 13". I intend to buy 2 stackable convection ovens of similar size. I hope to pick up 2 mixers as well.
The bread menu will have several breads. My thought now is to have a couple that will be available every day, and some available one day a week.
Karen
It's almost GN 1/1 size. Seems a bit narrow though. GN 1/1 is 530x325mm or 21" x 13".
I have a Lincat EC08 which is a GN 1/1 size oven with 3 shelves and water injection. I can bake 12 small (400g) loaves in it at a time, or 9 larger ones. I also have a smaller domestic oven with 2 shelves - that will do 6 small loaves or 4 large ones at a time.
I also replaced the oven grids with 10mm steel plates. Made a big difference to the bread - almost like a mini deck oven. Picture here:
http://moorbakes.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/oven.jpg
The ability to bake that many (or few!) at a time is going to be the biggest limitation. Factor in a 45 minute cycle time per bake too - to allow time to load/unload and get the temperature back up. Putting 12 loaves into it is like trying to boil 5 litres of water... It takes a lot of heat from the oven.
Saturday mornings is my biggest bake - all the dough has been fermenting overnight, so in the morning it's scale/shape/prove/bake. Starting at 5:45am the first lot goes into the big oven at about 7:15 and I put 2 lots through both ovens to get the bread out the door by 9am. I do about 26 loaves in that time.
Look for GN sized ovens - or whatever there is a standard for where you are - racks, fridges, etc. can all come in GN sizes here/Europe which makes it easy to buy trays, storage, etc. There is another standard here - 600x400mm which is more aimed at patisserie type ovens from what I gather.
Good luck! My little microbakery is at the fun/low-impact stage for me, but it's slowly growing.
-Gordon
Gordon,
I bought a bunch if restaurant 1/2 pans at an auction that are 18" x 13" and they work. I just measured and 13" x 21" will fit. 13" is my width and there is depth for the 21".
This is part of the learning in scaling up from the home kitchen, I guess. I didn't know that a restaurant 1/2 pan/tray is 2" different than a GN 1/1, which I assume is a baking industry standard. It's pretty scary knowing there is a whole lot that I don't know. My projections are that by the end of the first month I will be baking 40 saleable loaves per day (and my plan is to drop off the loaves that are not so pretty to a Sr. Citizen Center until I get it right) . I believe the ultimate capacity with the equipment, the space and with some employees will be nearly 200 loaves a day. It may take me years to get to that level of production.
Many people here have focused on scheduling production. That is the key, I know, and thanks for feedback on that. I have a feeling that I will start with my idea of a schedule and over the course of a few weeks it will be completely different. Since I am borrowing money for this venture, I do not have all the time in the world to get it right.
Thanks,
Karen
Sounds like your oven has GN size sliders - you'll be putting the tray on the grids - which is how I started on my Lincat - you can get trays that fit instead of the grids - but you don't need to initially.
Scaling - I reckoned I could do 3 runs through the Lincat, so 3 lots of 12 = 36 small loaves. Then use the smaller one for bigger loaves - so 3 runs through that, then I'm up to 40+ loaves a day and that's a practical limit for me in terms of capacity, timing and how much effort I can put into the bakery side of the business for now. (I also do patisserie, cakes, etc. and there's more profit in cakes than bread!) I will probably replace the smaller domestic oven with a larger Lincat by the end of this summer. The advantage of the Lincat for me is that it will plug into a domestic power socket. (3kW)
I don't have a shop-front though and I work from a room at home, so no three phase )-:
Almost all my breads are overnight risen sourdoughs. (and those that aren't are overnight yeasted ones using a small amount of organic yeast) Currently I start mid-afternoon to create bulk sourdough starter from the mother out of the fridge and weigh out all the flours (takes < 30 minutes), then at about 8:30 to 9:30pm I start mixing/kneading, then leave it all in big tubs/bowls overnight. No particularly high hydrations, (65% max) no overnight stretch & folds - just 9-10 hours of gentle rising. Through the week it's a 6:45am start and Saturday a 5:45am start.
Occasionally I prepare a regular yeasted bread for e.g. a lunchtime, so once I've scale/shaped a mid-week batch, I can knead up some regular yeasted dough for e.g. lunchtime focaccia and get that in the oven by about 10:30 and into the shop by 11am.
On the storage front, I try to keep one (25Kg) bag ahead of myself and re-order as soon as one bag nears the end. It would be good to make sure you know how long its going to take for flour to get to you unless you can collect when you need it.
-Gordon
As Gordon says "there's more profit in cakes than bread!". If you are in a locale where people stop by to purchase and you have a bit of dedicated floor space, there is also more profit in selling simple sandwiches on your delicious bread than there is in selling bread. You would get the double boost of realizing more immediate income and also promoting your primary product.
That is surely putting the cart before the horse, but something to think about in the growing months ahead.
Gordon, I just checked your profile (I need to make one), nice website! I see you have a Hobart A200 20 quart mixer. I have been using a Hobart N50 5 quart, which is like a kitchen aid. One of my questions, as I begin, is what size mixer? I have been looking at 20 qt., 30 qt. and 60 qt. mixers. One very big bonus of the building for the bakery is that it has 3 phase electric power on the pole just outside. I can hook up to 3 phase very reasonably. When I go to equipment auctions 3 phase equipment is very cheap, I assume because very few bakeries and restaurants in my rural area have access to the 3 phase power.
Question, is bigger better in mixing? I think I can buy a used 60qt 3 phase mixer for about the same price of a 20 quart 1 phase.
Karen
My A200 is older than me, and I'm not young... It could probably benefit from being serviced, but for now it's fine.
The most I put through it currently (I've no idea how much it will really take) is enough dough to make 4 large sourdough loaves. That's about 3.7Kg of dough. I've no idea what that equates to in "quarts", however I think the mixer could easily take double that. One reason for that is the fermentation tubs I have - they're 1/2GN size and only deep enough for that amount of dough.
I have a fairly relaxed attitude to kneading, so tonight while the A200 is whirring away, I'll hand knead (or rather leave autolyzing on the counter) some of the other smaller doughs. You've probably read my blog article on that :-)
I probably make too many different types of bread - life would be easier if it were just one type of dough to mix up, however it's nice to have choice...
Bigger is probably better, but I'd suggest mixing in batches you can put into the oven - else you'll have batches that get different lengths of proving - probably not an issue for slow sourdoughs, but might be for regular yeasted breads - then you might need a big fridge/retarder to keep things going at a regular pace...
Also check what the minimum quantity of dough a 60qt mixer will handle - I find the A200 isn't that good with < 1Kg of mix in it.
I also have the dough spiral for the A200 which I find much better than the dough hook. For bigger mixers I think I'd look at a spiral dough mixer rather than a planetary sort of general purpose mixer but I really don't know what I'll upgrade to when the time comes...
-Gordon
"...check what the minimum quantity of dough a 60qt mixer will handle - I find the A200 isn't that good with < 1Kg of mix in it."
It makes sense that the design of the hook and bowl on a mixer has a minimum amount that works. If yours is 3.7 kg capacity and 1 kg is the bottom limit, it would seem that something like 1/4 capacity or less defeats the design. Still, I will check what Hobart thinks. Thanks.
Karen
I know we use to make doughs with 15 lbs of flour without any issues in 60 Q bowl. The trick is to put the liquid in first and then mix the flour in using a spatula that way you don't end up with unincorporated dry ingredients. The mixer I have now is a Bear mixer made in Denmark and those bowls are taller and narrower so it is much better with small quantities in a large bowls.
Gerhard
Just my opinion but I think the 60 Q is the most versatile. It has a larger motor and is much more able to handle kneading dough than a smaller machine, remember just because you have a 60 Q mixer doesn't mean you need to use 50 lb of flour in each batch. I think when you go larger mixers the size of the bowls gets awkward and there are better options for making large quantities of dough than Hobart.
You can get one or two 60 Q bowls and an adapter for a 30 Q bowl. The smaller bowl is better for making batters, whipping cream and things like that. Personally I think buying multiple mixers is over kill but more bowls makes life more convenient. When you buy a mixer get the 60 Q bowl, the adapter and the 30 Q bowl plus the appropriate attachments 60 Q dough hook and flat beater and whip for the 30 Q. Then keep an eye out for auctions that have mixers in them, they often sell the bowls separate and you may get one for a bargain price.
Gerhard
Gerhard,
Thank you for your input, I would like to have more than one mixer and the 60Q 30Q adapter, haha. I think I can do that because I have had such good luck at auctions.
thank you again, Karen
As part of a renovation of a Hobart AE200 I am reading all the posts that mention Hobart on TFL.
How did your project go? please tell us how it worked out?
C
Some years ago I stopped at a tiny bakery in Fergus Falls, MN, on my way through. I chatted with the owner and his wife who'd opened the place only a couple of years earlier. He was quite willing to chat at the time. Friendly fellow. You might want to call him to discuss his experiences.
http://www.fallsbaking.com/Falls_Baking/Welcome.html
I doubt that he'd remember me, though he might because I rode into town on a big motorcycle and wanted to talk bread.
Thanks Rickaimd, I will contact him. Karen