Universal Pastry Line: the next generation

A pain au chocolat at breakfast, a pasty for lunch, a Danish pastry with your coffee - every moment becomes more enjoyable with a tasty treat. For over twenty years, Rademaker's Universal Makeup line has enabled customers to make a wide range of dough products from a laminator or bread line. A comprehensive update of the line makes production even more efficient and the name is changing to Universal Pastry Line. Operation is easier and intuitive, there are fewer wasted ingredients, the machine line requires less maintenance and meets the highest hygiene and safety standards. Rademaker’s System Architect, Jan de Kroon, and Senior Bakery Technologist, Richard van Dooren, were intensively involved in developing the new generation of the Universal Pastry Line. They tell us about it. 

Rademaker has been making pastry production lines for over forty years. During the past twenty years, this was done by the Universal Make-up line. This line has been developed based on information from the market and updated. ‘Before we embarked on the development process, we asked our salespersons worldwide to analyse the needs and wishes of their customers with respect to the Universal Make-up line. That generated a lot of information, which eventually led to a project assignment,’ says De Kroon. After an initial prototype and the beta version, it is now time to launch the Universal Pastry Line: the next generation. 

Design philosophy 
Key to the project was 'boosting the efficiency of the Universal Pastry Line'. To be able to approach the project in a targeted way, a design philosophy (see box) was developed. ‘This was based on five main requirements from the market and extra attention for the issues of safety and hygiene. Everything we did with respect to the redesign needed to make operation simpler and enable multiple deployability and simple tool changes, otherwise we were just tweaking things,’ De Kroon explains. 

Through its years of experience with customers worldwide, Rademaker Technology Centre (RTC) has acquired a great deal of knowledge of dough processing and other processes. The RTC therefore played an important role in developing the Universal Pastry Line. ‘What was once done by the baker is now done on a conveyor belt. In the first instance, this line must operate well from a technical perspective, and our engineers can ensure that. Then it is important to see how you can work as efficiently as possible and still achieve high product quality. Dough is a living material and the structure can be easily damaged by the various processes. Over the years, Rademaker has developed dough processing technology that handles the delicate dough very carefully, from the start of the production process to the final product,’ says Van Dooren. All the modifications were therefore extensively tested in the Rademaker Research and Development Centre and the RTC. 

Not big or complicated, but useful 
The basis of the existing production line fulfilled the needs, so no fundamentally new choices were required. De Kroon: ‘With efficiency improvement being our starting point, we looked at all the eighty units that can make up the line and made improvements. These were not necessarily big or complicated changes but always useful. These varied from small modifications like indicating the direction of the dough so that the unit is always placed correctly, an innovative lift system for the conveyor belt so that it dries faster after wet cleaning and the introduction of the Tool Assistant, which makes a big contribution to the fast and error-free changing of the line. The result is a machine that every user can operate, even someone without a bakery background.’ Van Dooren adds: ‘The set of Allen keys, a thirteen spanner and the familiar notebook with settings that each operator used to carry are now no longer needed due to the Tool Assistant.’ 

The updated line fits in with developments in the industry. Van Dooren: ‘Baking is a craft, but unfortunately there is less and less interest in this fantastic profession. Knowledge of the bakery sector is disappearing, particularly in industrial bakeries. More and more operators have no bakery background or training. Due to lack of knowledge and organisation, a lot of things go wrong in the dough processing and the production processes. That costs time and money. The Universal Pastry Line is a machine that allows the processes to be organised well and the Tool Assistant makes it easy to operate, which also ensures more uniform work between the different bakery employees, and tools are no longer necessary. In the Rademaker Technology Centre, we show our customers the advantages of the latest generation of the Universal Pastry Line, explain how the line works and how fast they can start using it.’ 

Patisserie to the conveyor belt 
The flexible, modular design of the Universal Pastry Line makes it possible to produce nearly all the various types of viennoiserie and laminated products in many shapes and sizes, filled or unfilled. Rademaker is increasingly moving from being a machine supplier to a system supplier in the triangle with the customer and suppliers of kneaders, proofing cabinets and ingredients. ‘Because of this development, our relationship with customers is changing. We are becoming more of a sparring partner. The process is now also more frequently reversed. While Rademaker merely used to deliver the machine so that the customers could make their product, customers now often ask us what they could produce. They are looking for new and different forms,’ says Van Dooren. ‘Traditional patisseries and bakers still make a lot of their products by hand. The next step is that our experienced team of technologists increasingly translate this into an industrial process. 

So, the continuous improvement of machine performance and finding innovative production and end-product solutions will not stop with the launch of the latest generation of the Universal Pastry Line. ‘We have learned a lot from updating this machine line and we will certainly apply that knowledge to other lines. And we will obviously continue listening to our customers. We enjoy sharing ideas so that they can make high-quality products,’ say De Kroon and Van Dooren. 

Jan de Kroon is System Architect at Rademaker and in this capacity monitors the content of projects. 

Richard van Dooren is Senior Bakery Technologist in the Rademaker Technology Centre in Culemborg. As a very experienced baker and technological expert in different line concepts, he is an important source of support for the engineers. 

Do you want to know more about the pastry make-up line? Feel free to contact our sales team via +31 (0)345 543 543 or send an email to sales@rademaker.nl. You can also fill out our contact form and we will get back to you as soon as possible.

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