How Many Oven Racks is Enough for My Bakery?

Starting a new bakery business is an exciting venture, especially if you’ve been listening to people tell you for years now how you should be making money on those baking skills. As a new business owner, you don’t want to be worried about whether you can meet the demands of your customers, but you also need to balance out startup costs without going too crazy at the beginning. While there are many essential pieces of equipment for a new bakery to choose, one of the biggest questions that comes up is how many oven racks is enough?

What Type of Oven Do You Have?

Many new bakers choose a convection oven because it is an affordable choice to get delicious baked breads, and can also be used for other bakery items like cookies, cakes, and pies. If you anticipate larger volumes, or you wanted something a little bigger, you may have gone with a rotating rack oven that allows you to roll one or more racks right into the oven and bake them without moving trays back and forth. If you have the latter, you will need some extra racks to be able to use some during baking and others for prep purposes, so keep in mind that you want more than you will have inside the oven at any given time.

How Much Storage Do You Need?

When you are operating a business, you need to find ways to save time. One of the primary ways that bakers can save time is not moving trays around all day. Chances are you will only display a portion of your baked goods in the serving area for the customers to see, but you don’t want to have to run around to find more stashed away on trays or in areas of the back that are hard to access. Keeping extra baked goods on the oven racks is a great way to store them in the back, and offers several advantages:

• Multi-level storage with high capacity in a small space
• No need to build fixed shelving in the back of your shop, which may get in the way
• Movable storage shelves that can be adjusted according to your needs, and scaled up or down depending on the day and the bakery volumes
• Adjustable shelf sizing so you can space the shelves farther apart when you have large baked goods like cakes or closer together for small, flat items like cookies
• It’s easy to add more storage over time if you expand production, simply buy more oven racks

Ask the Experts

The exact number of oven racks that you need will vary, depending on the size of your bakery, volume of cooking, and type of oven you have. If you’re not sure how many you need, talk to the experts at DoughTech to get some help and advice.