PROVIDENCE, RI — There are no baked goods without bakers. As a result, it’s important that bakery owners level up their operations to support and retain these essential members of the artisan baking industry.
In a lecture titled Scaling Up: Happy Bakers Bake Better Bread (Growth with a focus on the stuff that matters) during Camp Bread, an event hosted by the Bread Bakers Guild of America March 5-7 at Johnson and Wales University in Providence, RI, Josh Allen, founder of Companion Baking in St. Louis, shared his insights on how investing in equipment can also improve employee retention. As the baking industry as a whole continues to struggle with turnover and skilled labor, equipment investments can help bakeries support their bakers.
With over 30 years of experience in the baking industry, Josh shared some of the steps and lessons he’s learned throughout his career. Throughout the session, he walked through how key investments in mixing, makeup, baking and packaging equipment have made a difference in retention, product quality and injury rates.
Some of the guiding principles behind Companion’s equipment investments focus on safety, retention, accessibility, quality, efficiency and increased capacity.
“There’s a lot of stuff that can be dangerous inside a shop, and we’ve got to make sure we pay attention to those things,” Josh said. “Safety leads to retention, so a safe environment and one that has great job satisfaction means we can retain our people.”
Josh shared that at Companion, many of the decisions regarding which equipment to buy and how to grow the business are made with retention in mind.
“Before the pandemic, if we needed more help, we could just go hire more help and throw more labor at various processes; that’s not the case anymore,” he said. “Now, the decision is one, how do I take care of the people I have when, two, I can’t find somebody else? Automation is the only way we can continue to grow.”
“Safety leads to retention, so a safe environment and one that has great job satisfaction means we can retain our people.”
— Josh Allen | founder | Companion Baking
In making investments such as mixers with removable bowls and bowl lifts and deck ovens, there is additional accessibility for older bakers and those who may not be as tall as their colleagues.
“We’ve really focused in the last five to seven years on making every job accessible to any body type — tall, short, strong, not-so-strong — and it’s really made a difference in the people we’ve been able to retain,” he said.
Equipment investments can also help with common health and safety risks associated with scooping dough out of a mixer and loading ovens.
“If you’re a small shop and you do four to five mixes a day and that’s what you’re going to be, that’s fine,” Josh said. “But if you want to grow and mix eight, 10, 12 mixes a day, there is a point where you’re setting yourself up for trouble with back pain and other kinds of injuries that are really extensive and long-term if you’re digging dough out of a bowl.”
He also noted other opportunities available within each category for growth and scaling, depending on the level of automation already in a bakery. This includes equipment such as dough lifts and different oven loading systems that best fit a bakery’s space and production needs.
While the decision to scale with automation varies from bakery to bakery, taking these factors into account can help bakery owners form the right decisions for their operations.
