Golden Crust Pastries Ltd, Palmerston North, New Zealand, specialise in the manufacture of wholesale ready rolled pastry for use by their customers in pies, savouries, cakes and other delicious pastry based products. This report is about how Golden Crust Pastries have used the ‘Vantage’ Ingredient Lot, Recipe Control and Finished Product Tracking Solution to go above and beyond the Traceability requirement from even the most stringent customer audits.

Owner Guy Field has been in the baking business all his working life and has a focused approach to providing pastry at a wholesale level. Guy Field has recently seen his customer led traceability requirements increasing. The investment in ‘Vantage’ from Stevens Group Ltd provides the assurances they need to satisfy stringent regulations. However, Guy views Traceability in a positive light and an opportunity to make improvements to his business on all levels. “We’re using it as a tool to show our wholesalers just what we can do with traceability” Guy Field said.

The fact that all pastry manufactured requires a number of different ingredients, can pose difficulties in keeping track of individual amounts used and that correct quantities are added to ensure a consistent product. Stevens Group Ltd has extensive knowledge and experience in the area of recipe control and inventory management (raw ingredient and finished product).

Golden Crust Pastries Ltd is a customer who has seen the ingredient savings by installing the system; “It made us become a more efficient company. We’re more streamlined in how we operate and know if any waste is occurring; previously we weren’t keeping those numbers. Now that we can record those figures, our staff are more aware of what they are doing. With the waste now eliminated, money is saved.” Guy Field said.

The system installed at Golden Crust Pastries Ltd provides traceability & quality assurance from received ingredients to the dispatch of finished inventory. Along the process are ‘Vantage’ Touch Screen Terminals connected to weighing platforms which enable the manufacturing plan to be communicated with the production floor. As the system records key QA data such as Metal Detector & Temperature, manual data collection tasks have been eliminated, as have time consuming paper based production and traceability records.

The formula for a particular product is entered into the PC Server via the recipe formulation management software. The system allows management to enter and determine the exact recipe characteristics, including individual ingredient tolerances and how the products are added. For instance, recipes may be a mixture of weighed ingredients and non weighed items – both of which are controlled to tight tolerances (enforced by the system) to produce a consistent taste and texture to the pastry.

The system calculates the amounts of individual ingredients needed and downloads the order to the relevant station, providing an effortless formulation process, with the large screen prompting the operator throughout as each correct amount of ingredient is added. The system will not allow the operator to continue if the incorrect ingredient is selected or the wrong amount added. Detailed instructions relating to product characteristics are also flagged up to ensure adequate HACCP requirements are met.

Once the final product has been prepared, portioned and packaged, the finished product is labeled to ensure the relationship between the manufactured batch and the finished product code is adhered to. Once the label has been applied, the finished product inventory system is then updated to provide real time visibility of exactly how many products have been produced.

The final piece of software is a customer sales order processing system. This software enables customer specific orders to be entered into the system and then the orders are sent to the dispatch terminal for the operator to ‘allocate’ the inventory.

The end result is a system which can trace an ingredient through the manufacturing process to a finished product. In the event of an ingredient recall, Golden Crust Pastries Ltd can provide their customers with the assurance that they have 100% visibility of which ingredient has been used, how much and when.

Stevens Group Ltd Sales Manager, Toby Hawkins, comments “Stevens Group Ltd is a company who pride themselves on thinking outside of the box to deliver solutions to eliminate paperwork and provide customers with a return on investment through improved recipe control and inventory efficiency. The team at Golden Crust Pastry are forward thinking and appreciate that traceability can be turned from being an auditing headache into something which can be used to deliver real business value. Above all, the confidence it provides is giving them a competitive advantage in the marketplace.” For further information, contact Stevens Group Ltd directly or Wedderburn, who provide representation for Stevens and have offices covering Australia and New Zealand.