IN-STORE OVENS
10
Part 1
Networked and increasingly smarter baking+biscuit international asked manufacturer of in-store ovens how the pandemic is affecting
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their sales and what direction the technology is taking.
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It is impossible to imagine bakery stores without in-store ovens. Without them, there would be no baking stations in food retail, and in general the foodservice industry with its wide variations needs these helpers. For manufacturers, this is a comfortable situation – individual market segments may weaken, but rarely all of them. This is also shown by the survey of oven manufacturers conducted by the editors of baking+biscuit international. The impact of the pandemic on their sales figures depends on how strongly their business is shaped by bakers with and without catering, the retail trade or the various foodservice segments. The first lockdown initially gave everyone a shock in the spring, but once it became clear which stores would be allowed to open and what product lines could be sold, a willingness to invest returned for some customers. Because the pandemic made some people from outside the industry
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think about their future, one or two stove manufacturers also registered ‘career changer’ as a new customer group. The requirements for in-store bakery ovens have not changed fundamentally, but the pandemic has brought individual trends and topics into focus and even put some on the priority list for the first time. These include thinking about the social distancing of employees and the reduction of contacts between operator, goods and oven through intelligent operator interaction and the automation of handling by loaders and unloaders. Efficient work with fewer and less trained personnel is another common thread that has been gaining renewed importance for some time. On the one hand, this goal is followed by controls that bear the label ‘child's play’ and require little more from the staff than pressing a picture on the touchscreen.
