Once again, SG Systems are leading the way with their factory floor Formulation Control & Lot Tracking Solutions, this time with West Caldwell, NJ based Original Bagel Company.

Strategically located 20 miles west of Manhattan in West Caldwell, New Jersey; Original Bagel Company is one of the leading wholesale bakeries in North America focused exclusively on traditional water-boiled bagels. 

The Company began humbly in 1995 with a modest rented facility and minimal equipment. In the ensuing decade, Original Bagel enjoyed significant sales growth and dramatically expanded its equipment.

Today Original Bagel occupies its own 30,000 square foot building, housing both executive offices, the scratch baking operation and cold storage.

Employing over fifty hard-working people, Original Bagel enjoys sales across North America throughout all major channels of distribution. Original Bagel is focused on three primary areas – quality oriented in-store bakeries, upscale foodservice purveyors and specialty stores. It is an independently inspected Company & certified Kosher.

The fact that all bagels are prepared largely by hand and require 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. SG Systems has extensive knowledge and experience in the area of formula control and inventory management (raw ingredient and finished product)

Original Bagel is a customer who has seen the ingredient savings by installing the system; “We’ve found that it made us become a better company. We’re more streamlined in how we do things and know if any waste is occurring; previously we weren’t keeping those numbers. Now that we can record those figures, our guys are more aware of what they are doing. With the waste now eliminated, dollars are saved.” Mark Wolfson, Director of Quality Assurance said.

The system installed at Original Bagel provides traceability from receiving ingredients through the production formulation process to enable complete lot and batch traceability. Along the process are 2 ‘Vantage’ Touch Screen Terminals connected to weighing platforms and label printers which enable the manufacturing plan to be communicated with the production team. The system has virtually eliminated time consuming paper based production and traceability records.

The formula for particular products are 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 bagged ingredients – both of which are weighed to tight tolerances (enforced by the system) to produce a consistent taste and texture to the bagel.

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 cooked and packaged, the finished box count is entered into the system. The finished product inventory system is then updated to provide real time visibility of exactly how many boxes 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 receiving & shipping terminal for the operator to ‘allocate’ the inventory.

The Tightest Possible Traceability

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, we can provide our customers with the assurance that we have 100% visibility of which ingredient has been used, how much and when.

SG Systems’ General Manager, Stuart Hunt, comments “SG 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. The team at Original Bagel are forward thinking, innovative and appreciate that traceability can be turned from being an FDA headache into something which can be used to deliver real business value. Above all though, they make a knock-out bagel and we always enjoy our visits to their factory!”