From their fully-automated production plant in Silverdale, Dad’s Pies caters for pie lovers nationally and internationally. Editor Stefan Richter took a tour of the high-tech facility.
Have you ever, after filling up your vehicle’s tank at a BP service station, felt the urge to also fill up your stomach there? Then you might have already savoured one of Dad’s Pies’ baked delicacies without knowing it. “We offer our products – classic and gourmet pies, sausage rolls and savouries – both chilled and frozen. The chilled products primarily go to BP’s Wild Bean Cafes and 2go stores,” explains Marketing Director Michael Welch. The relationship to BP dates back to the year 1988 when Eddie Grooten, the Dad’s Pies’ Managing Director, supplied the first BP service station with pies. “We still supply BP with our products,” says Michael, “and we are now their exclusive supplier in New Zealand. But we do not think of stopping at this point and have also started expanding internationally.” This doesn’t sound too bad for a company that started as a small beachfront shop 31 years ago.
In 1981, Eddie Grooten and his wife Erika, both of them Dutch immigrants, bought a small shop called Dad’s Pies, which was located on the shore at Red Beach. “Eddie would bake fresh pies every day, load them into his van and deliver them to all the dairies and schools in the local area,” relates Michael, “but he finally realised that the future lies in wholesaling pies rather than just operating from one retail shop.” The visionary shop owner very quickly grew his business. An initial 60,000 dollars turnover skyrocketed to 360,000 dollars annual turnover just two years later. In 1987 Eddie moved into new premises located only two streets away from the current factory, where he purchased the local bakery. Within two years he then took over two buildings next to the factory. In order to set himself up for national and international expansion, Eddie finally had a new facility built in Silverdale in 2001, and also took over the building next door in 2008. Now equipped with enough space to meet future production demands, he decided to invest heavily in state-of-the art automation technology for mass production rather than maintaining his old, manual pie lines. “Eddie started to source and purchase special equipment, especially from the Dutch company Rademaker, who specialises in designing and building pastry making equipment to customer specifications. We utilise a total of four Rademaker lines in the different areas of our factory.”
How Dad’s Pies are made
During a tour of the busy production facility, Michael gives an insight into the automated mass production of pies. The pastry dough for the pies is made in an automated mixing line from VMI, a French company. “The control system of the mixing machine is preprogrammed with all the recipes for the different types of pastry we use. The machine automatically deposits the correct amounts of flour and water in the mixing bowl, only margarine and re-work pastry have to be added manually,” explains Michael, “This process step could also be automated, but it only requires operator intervention every ten minutes for only a moment or two. The machine stops and waits for the operator to add these ingredients through a set of automated doors and then carries on with the kneading process.” After the preset mixing time has elapsed, a lift automatically deposits the pastry dough in the hopper which feeds the laminating line.
The laminating line is one of Dad’s Pies’ four Rademaker machines and extrudes the ready-mixed dough into a dough sheet and reduces its thickness from approximately 150mm thickness down to 30mm, utilising three reducing stations with a pair of gauging rollers on each. A so called lapper, a vertical oscillating transport belt, builds up layers of dough on a moving belt and thereby creates the puff pastry's typical layered structure. “We can adjust the process to achieve up to 20 layers,” says Michael. “Then an operator adds two folds by hand and feeds the puff pastry dough to a second reduction line, which is also from Rademaker.” This final process step in the dough production reduces the puff pastry sheets to the desired width and thickness. “As we grow our capacity we have the ability to add an additional step to the laminator which will connect directly from the existing laminator onto the second reduction line. We can then also include an automated resting station to reduce the resting time down to 40 minutes. At the moment the pastry sheets are put on racks by an operator to let them rest overnight.”
In order to be able to produce customer-specific pies, Dad’s Pies has maintained some small production lines that can make small batches in a manual, labour-intensive process. “When you bring in automation on the scale we did, it becomes very expensive to customise individual products for customers,” explains Michael, “So we still utilise some of our older, smaller machines which rely heavily on manual labour, but are far more flexible.” Because these smaller machines do not have automatic feeds for the pastry, two operators run a dough sheeter which will take the finished puff pastry dough, reduce it to size and put the dough sheets on pins. A cutting/stacking line from Rademaker takes the pins of pastry, cuts the dough sheets to the desired shape and stacks them automatically. With the help of a pie machine manufactured by the Australian company Simple Simon, four operators fill the pies which, after being baked in rack or rotary ovens, are immediately transferred to the spiral freezer. “To increase the production volume of this line in the future, we can replace the dough sheeter with a direct connection to automatically supply the cutting/stacking line with pastry.”
The fully-automated mass production at Dad’s Pies takes place on a Rademaker pie line which is automatically supplied with ready-to-use pastry from the reduction line. A pneumatic suction system deposits aluminium foils in the machine, these are filled with pieces of dough, and the first of two four-ton-presses shapes the dough in the form of the foil. Then a pneumatic depositing system fills the pies, and, after the top pastry layer has been applied, the second press shapes this top layer and adds the necessary decorations. Finally an egg wash mixture is sprayed on top of the pies – to give them a nice golden brown colour after baking – and a conveyor belt transfers them to the oven. “This fully automated line is our most efficient one in the whole factory,. It has the capacity to produce in excess of 9000 pies an hour, with a team of 4-5 operators,” adds Michael. The pie line for mass production is controlled by Allen-Bradley PLCs and Rockwell Automation software from one single touch screen.
Three years ago Dad’s Pies installed a serpentine oven from Auto-Bake in Australia and automated the transfer of the products from the pie production line to the new oven and from there directly into a spiral freezer. “This gas-powered serpentine oven was one of the first installed in this country. It is a revolutionary technology which replaces the traditional tunnel ovens. The vertical oven process requires only 30 percent of the space of a tunnel while offering the same baking capacity,” says Michael, and adds, “The oven uses 20,000 dollars’ worth of grease every single year. At times we run temperatures in excess of 300 degrees, which requires the use of highly specialised grease.” After the baked pies leave the oven, they are directly transferred to a cooling conveyor, where they are cooled down prior to entering the spiral freezer. “We reduce the core temperature of the pie from 90 to two or three degrees Celsius in about 90 minutes. This time can be adjusted if necessary.”
When the chilled or frozen pies finally come down from the spiral freezer, an automated conveyor system transports the products to an X-ray machine and a metal detector, where the pies are checked for foreign bodies. Some of the pies are additionally wrapped into plastic foil before they end up in cardboard boxes to be transported to hungry customers nationally and internationally. “The cartons are taped and labelled automatically, and the wrapping machine uses only one kind of wrapping material. After selecting the product, all the relevant information is printed onto the plastic wrap,” explains Michael. “However, the pies are still put into the cartons by hand. Every pie differs slightly in shape, size and weight, and these variances render an automated handling and packaging of pies impracticable. We use this manual process step as an opportunity to conduct a final visual check of every single product.”
Into the future
Dad’s Pies’ production facility has been set up with growth in mind. “The equipment we have installed is based on meeting future demand,” says Michael. “We are only running at 25 to 30 percent capacity at the moment. This allows us to guarantee to meet our customers’ demand at all times without first purchasing more equipment to expand production. The high degree of automation in our factory also allows us to guarantee consistent product quality and appearance. The manual production process causes greater variances: You can put two pies coming from the same line on the same day next to each other and they won’t even look the same.” There is also enough space available for spatial expansion. “We have secured the lease on the building next door. Currently we operate a 600 pallet bulk freezer in there, which handles our entire frozen product for national deliveries. And we sub-lease the rear of the building to another tenant,” says Michael. “I think we will be able to utilise our current premises for at least another 15 years before we run out of space.”
Dad’s Pies’ brand is becoming more internationally known. “There are some very prestigious customers in Dubai, but it is still a new market for us. We are proud to supply Emirates Airlines with pies for their first and business class passengers, and our products are available at events such as the Dubai Rugby Sevens and the Dubai Golf Open. We also supply a company called International Fine Foods in Hong Kong and have just secured the contract for the Hong Kong Rugby Sevens. This event has become a very good avenue to introduce our product. Our products are also sent to Korea, Singapore and Japan. In Canada we have a number of possible interests, but we are not supplying anyone directly yet.” Fortunately you don’t need to fly to these faraway places to savour one of Dad’s Pies’ delicious products. A short trip to the next BP station does the same trick.
Email: mike@dadspies.co.nz
