Scott McCally, president, Auto-Bake Serpentine and Hinds-Bock Corporation

The challenge is ‘lights out’ food production

The industry narrative surrounding everything automation is a very interesting topic, especially in the current circumstances. Auto-Bake Serpentine defines the need for automation as follows: when the demand for computation, precision, repeatability, speed, and endurance exceeds our human sensibilities.

+Scott McCally, president, Auto-Bake Serpentine and Hinds-Bock Corporation at The Middleby Corporation, talked automation, recent challenges and navigating better ways of doing business.

Mihu: What challenges has 2020 brought to Auto-Bake? Please share an overview of how the challenges affected the way the company works, incoming requests, and the supply chain overall. Scott McCally: In many ways, our service response became paralyzed. Auto-Bake has service resources in various regions across the world. Our customers rate us near the top of all OEMs year after year in overall service efficacy, yet we found ourselves lacking through COVID-19 challenges: + Logistics across the world became unpredictable, sluggish, and expensive. + Our high-volume parts inventories that are managed on a quarterly replenishment cycle became depleted. + Demand for retail production skyrocketed, which created an immediate demand for more capacity from our producers. + Even with production demand high, our customers faced extreme absenteeism among bakery production staff.

Mihu: Based on these challenges, what are some of the key learnings acquired and how will they influence the way business is conducted going forward? McCally: We have become more adept at remote service execution; however, that is no substitute for having qualified personnel on-site when and where necessary. We have increased the size and reach of our worldwide service team to ensure that we are much more capable and agile to handle COVID-19 type restrictions. We hired more people and trained the staff in the Middleby worldwide offices. They already had service team members, but they had not necessarily been trained on Auto-Bake equipment specifically. Software, working remotely and better communication with customers also helped provide them with the support they needed. As we reemerge out of the COVID era, we are much closer to on-demand service execution. Uptime is everything for our customers and we are vertically focused throughout our organization on maximizing our customer’s production throughput and efficiency. + We are better leveraging the full Middleby worldwide manufacturing capability and capacity to deliver parts, assemblies, and in some cases machines within the local region. + We have increased our stocking inventories on high volume and critical parts. + The increase in retail production depleted our customer’s production capacity and positioned our Auto-Bake On Demand equipment as the opportunistic solution to increase output immediately.

Mihu: What are the company’s plans for this year and beyond? What will a ‘new normal’ mean for Auto-Bake and what are the priorities around which it is being established? McCally: We continue to be customer-centric in our priorities. 2020 was challenging for our customers, we believe we have learned how to execute better under such conditions. The new normal is that we are better equipped to serve our customers across the world quickly and effectively. Our digital service and support capabilities have expanded rapidly, by fire, of course. Beyond our usual network, we now use XMReality, for example, a virtual reality type of software to help provide service, in addition to streaming video. These were initiatives that otherwise were two or three years away, now we have integrated them into the core of our service capabilities.

Mihu: How has the work at the Bakery Innovation Center changed? What Auto-Bake equipment can be trialed there and how? McCally: Until COVID, the BIC hosted six-eight seminar events per year. That has changed and may not return in the same form of its previous identity. The world has found that much can be accomplished virtually. As we continue to foster new product development and equipment technologies to solve the most difficult market challenges, the BIC will be utilized with on-site experts presenting to a virtual audience. We see this as a very positive growth transition, allowing us to reach more participants with each event. We have a very flexible Auto-Bake line [at the BIC] equipped with everything necessary to trial almost any product. This remains critical to demonstrating how our technology is suitable for all bakery and food product categories, not only cake, which we are so well known for.

© Auto-Bake

Scott McCally, president, Auto-Bake Serpentine and Hinds-Bock Corporation at The Middleby Corporation

Mihu: What are your thoughts on the level of automation currently in industrial bakeries and what features do you consider must-haves for the upcoming years? McCally: This is such an interesting topic right now. Higher automation is undoubtedly the direction that all our customers are heading post-COVID; however, there are market demands that still exist that were emerging pre-COVID, which critically challenge the effectiveness of higher automation. I am not sure that producers and equipment OEMs have yet grasped these two opposing forces. Automation is clearly the right direction when producing just a few SKUs of a product that has market stability and longevity. It becomes both an expensive and difficult business decision when developing new products and/or producing many SKUs using the same production line. Auto-Bake is very strong in emerging markets where this type of ‘FlexAgility’ is essential for our customer’s success. ‘FlexAgility’ is the flexibility for the line to run a broad product range AND have the agility to change between products quickly thus minimizing production downtime. Auto-Bake leads in automation where the reduction of labor and maximization of throughput within limited space is necessary.

Mihu: And in what aspects is automation in bakery lagging behind, compared with other industries? What inspiration can be used from other industries (then adapted and applied in bakery too)? McCally: An industrial bakery production line is an automated assembly line from raw ingredients to finished packaged goods. When comparing to other industrial assembly line automation technologies, bakery lags, but not as far as some would think. There is a continuum of equipment technology not within every bakery’s purview. The largest producers who purchase new equipment annually, many times replacing older production lines, enjoy the latest technological advancements. In many cases, these advancements are on par with most other industries, outside of high tech, but certainly gaining on industries such as pharma. Auto-Bake defines the need for automation as present when the demand for computation, precision, repeatability, speed, and endurance exceeds our human sensibilities. The challenge that I am setting for myself, our Middleby Bakery Brands, and our customers is ‘lights out’ food production. Food is personal, very personal, and very intimate. We schedule our lives around our meals, and our relationships deepen and grow when we break bread together. Complete ‘lights out’ factory automation won’t change any of that, in fact, we will get more of our time back so we can spend more of it eating!

Mihu: Innovation deeply relies on digitization and smart features. With COVID-19 accelerating the use of such tools in everyday life, what do you anticipate Industry 4.0 will mean in bakery – and what will it mean for Auto-Bake? McCally: Industry 4.0 has many facets, which we are tackling in a phased approach. COVID-19 certainly accelerated our development for sensory feedback across our systems so that we can remotely monitor and support the equipment more effectively. One of the facets in our first phase includes the development of our IIoT cloud platform. We have leveraged another Middleby company, Powerhouse Dynamics (PHD), to assist with the integration. What separates our ‘connected’ solution from our OEM competition is the established history and reputation that PHD has earned as an ‘open-sourced’ service provider. Before Middleby purchased PHD and since, they excel at mining, protecting, and delivering key performance indicators (KPIs) in a cloud-based platform across multiple locations with competing OEM equipment. This ‘ethical wall’ gives each OEM involved the comfort and security that their information is protected, while providing comprehensive application insight for the customer. Customers do not want to navigate multiple OEM cloud platforms to glean information on a single production line. At Middleby, we are providing a single platform for all their equipment and locations. You can visit https://powerhousedynamics.com/ open-kitchen/ to understand how we do this for the food service industry already.

Mihu: The Middleby Group recently showcased how a robot automated marbling for a customer. How can Auto-Bake work with bakeries to design and develop such specific solutions to their needs? McCally: Auto-Bake and all of us at Middleby Bakery listen for the pain points and look for automation opportunities that have a clear and quick return on investment. In the case of the marbling robotic solution, it was both challenging and risky for us and the customer. It was a risk that we were comfortable taking, mitigating throughout with proper iterative testing of the initial theory of operation. For us, innovation always follows the basic scientific method, and so long as we have the time to do develop the idea properly we have a great team of engineers who will deliver a successful solution.

Mihu: Auto-Bake gained international recognition with the Serpentine technology for continuous baking. What improvements will the next-generation updates aim to bring? What are the aspects in focus? McCally: We continue to focus on our core identity by innovating around our unique base Serpentine technology. We are developing disruptive advancements that will reduce our footprint by another 50%, increase our throughput in the same space by double, and at the same time decrease our energy usage by more than 30%. This will be done by employing two technologies, one related to rapid baking and the other, to rapid cooling. These will be rolled out soon; we will share details as they are launched – later this year, before iba (cooling), respectively next year, ahead of IBIE (baking).

Mihu: We are looking forward to learning more, thank you!

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