Yummy BakeryIndustrial bakery Pancakes tailored to every season

The situation

Saint Nicholas in December, a heart for Valentine’s Day, a Christmas tree during the festive season: children, and let’s be honest, plenty of adults too, enjoy a pancake that moves with the seasons. What looks like a fun detail on the plate is a serious production challenge for a bakery producing at scale. Converting a production line for a few weeks of themed shapes is expensive and time-consuming, often too expensive to make temporary seasonal products profitable. At Yummy Bakery, the pancake company from the Bruges region, that is the challenge every time again.

What does this mean for you?

Do you face a similar tension between flexibility and cost, for example to respond quickly to a season or demand without having to restructure your line? CTRL engineering designs modular, quickly interchangeable parts and tests designs first via 3D printing, so that adapting no longer requires an expensive conversion.

The challenge

Yummy Bakery wanted to offer seasonal pancakes without having to shut down the production line for hours each time for an expensive mechanical conversion. Every stoppage costs production capacity, and therefore money.

Our approach

CTRL engineering designed a series of special dosing heads for the different pancake shapes. To quickly arrive at the right baking shape, CTRL engineering used 3D printing technology to evaluate different designs and find the best-fitting mould. The final design was then developed in food-safe material, suitable for daily, intensive use on the production line. Thanks to this approach, the shape could be adjusted quickly and cheaply, even before an expensive final mould was made. The design was built so that switching from one mould to another can happen very quickly.

“Thanks to CTRL engineering, we gained the flexibility to launch new pancake shapes while keeping our production efficient and stable.”

- Sara Geldhof, CEO Yummy Bakery

The result

Yummy Bakery can now launch new seasonal shapes at scale, without expensive or time-consuming changes to the production line. A new seasonal product becomes a simple matter of swapping a head, not a half-day shutdown.