The Intersection of Kitchen Equipment and Profits

If you’re an owner or manager of an industrial bakery, you operate just like any other business – with a constant eye to your products and quality, and how these drive and interact with your overall return on investment, or ROI. Finding the right balance here is the name of the game for any successful business from a broad standpoint.

When it comes to the bakery, one of the chief elements of this conversation is the baking equipment we provide at Dough Tech. From bread mixers to oven racks, water meters and chillers and several other products, we can help you ensure you always have efficient, modern machinery in your bakery. How does the proper equipment lead to a strong ROI, and how do these areas intersect? Here are some basics we can recommend to bakery owners and managers everywhere.

Why Equipment Matters

The simplest reason why bakery equipment is important is relatively obvious: It affects the quality of the products you create. The better your products, the more likely you are to receive repeat business and boost your ROI, starting a beneficial cycle.

Many, though, don’t realize that proper baking equipment is important for other additional reasons as well, though each of these relates back to overall quality. Here are two broad areas of bakery equipment importance that you should keep in mind:

• Shelf life: Baking requires a collection of various products, from common areas like sugar and flour to grain, wheat and numerous others. Many of these products that are kept in bakeries have limited shelf lives, and will cause significant waste and lost profits if they aren’t mixed properly – and a lack of proper equipment can lead to this kind of waste. If your equipment isn’t optimized, you could be wasting huge amounts of product just to get the same results as your competitors.
• Cost and efficiency: Like with any element of your business that you spend money on, equipment plays a direct role in your overall profit margins. The right equipment will provide value well beyond what you paid for it, while the wrong choices can lead to major waste and negative value.

Balancing Quality and ROI

Every baking business operates differently, with varying scales and material sources, and this means balancing high-quality equipment with ROI will differ between each. That said, here are some broad questions that we recommend asking yourself when you’re looking into any kind of new baking equipment:

• What kind of space will this equipment take up in the bakery? Will this require changing any other processes to accommodate space needs?
• How easy will this equipment be for my operators to use with their current training? Will new training be required?
• What kinds of maintenance and cleaning requirements does this equipment come with?
• How versatile is the equipment for different kinds of bakery needs? How high is the product quality across each of these areas?

For more on how bakery equipment and ROI intersect, or to learn about any of our offerings, speak to the staff at Dough Tech today.