The pie’s the limit with bakery’s £3M investment

Sweet and savoury baker Wrights has invested £3M in modern pie and freezing lines at is main bakery in Crewe, Cheshire.

The investment puts the bakery “at the cutting edge of catering industry technology”, helping to boost efficiency and quality, said operations manager Neville Carruthers.

An £800,000 pie line would bring new levels of productivity to the bakery, with new handling technology to eliminate waste as pie bases and lids are formed, he said.

“As well as saving money, this is a major quality bonus, as recycled pastry is always of inferior quality. We refuse to compromise on quality, so when we designed and commissioned the new state-of-the-art Radermaker pie line we wanted innovation to improve our products.

“Our unique no scrap system means every single pie on the line is made from virgin dough, which is of better quality and more consistent,” he added.

Carruthers claimed the investment would crank up production to 20,000 sausage rolls an hour and 10,000 pasties or pies an hour - efficiency improvements that would mean a return on investment in two years, he predicted.

The addition of a spiral freezer meant pies, sausage rolls and pasties were not touched by human hand from the flour stage to packing, he explained. The continuous process also meant finished savouries were frozen and sent to the packing room in a matter of minutes: just 11 minutes for sausage rolls to reach minus 20°C, instead of five hours using traditional blast freezers.

This achieved a 45% saving on running costs, while a cooling system, which uses carbon dioxide in a closed loop rather than the traditional ammonia, also dramatically reduced energy costs.