Category Insight

Hitting the sweet spot

BY LIZ GOODWIN

Photo courtesy of Mel-O-Cream

When the term “old fashioned” collides with the modern world of food, the donut immediately comes to mind.

A darling for multiple generations, donuts are nostalgia personified: the Sunday morning sweet, a champion of rainbow sprinkles and a versatile vehicle for fruity and chocolate flavors alike. Moms love them, grandparents love them, and, of course kids love them. This sweet good appeases all ages. But make no mistake — this classic pastry is by no means stagnant. It straddles the line of timeless and cuttingedge, featuring flavors from Boston cream to matcha passion fruit, and producers are figuring out how to get the best of both worlds. But with all the hurdles that come with running a business in this time, it’s no small feat. Here’s how different donut bakeries are working to find their production sweet spot. Perhaps one of the greatest advantages of donuts is the wide range of flavors available to experiment with. While favorites such as jelly-filled and classic glazed maintain their grip, consumers are also more open to trying different variations. But just because the options exist doesn’t mean its easy to bring them to fruition. Donut producers, just like every other business in this country, are struggling to find people to move that experimentation along.

And with the labor crisis persisting in 2022, bakeries have had to shift their production strategy.

Chad Larson, VP and COO of Springfield, IL-based Mel-O-Cream Donuts International, knows firsthand how hard it is to find people to work.

“It’s the biggest challenge that baking manufacturers face, and I could never have said that two years ago,” he said. “It’s really changed how we look at our needs, so as we figure out how to move forward, now we’re asking how we can automate that process.”

Automation has become essential for many bakeries, donut makers included. It’s an initiative that’s also imperative to the team at Cincinnati-based United Dairy Farmers (UDF), manufacturers of both ice cream and donuts. The operation went from seven days a week down to a low of just five due to COVID-related challenges, but now the bakery is back at its full seven days a week production and delivery schedule. The bakery was able to keep all its employees working throughout the pandemic by transferring some workers to ice cream production, but it’s also brought in some robots to help carry the weight.

“We roughly make anywhere between 25,000 to 30,000 donuts a day,” said Henry Lopez, plant manager of UDF Bakery. “It was a challenge at that level of volume to get all our different tasks done. And with only 18 people each day, its pretty well automated. We continue to explore ways to further automate out production and picking process.”

UDF also has an advantage when it comes to humans and machines living in harmony: It creates less waste. The bakery is known for its unique items such as square donuts among other specialty products, which minimize the amount of scrap when it’s being cut from a sheet on its Rademaker continuous sheeter line. The signature look is a great bonus, too.

“If you’ve got a flat sheet running down a line and you’re cutting round donuts, you’re generating much more scrap dough that you have to do something with,” Lopez said. “But you could generate so much scrap that it starts to affect the product quality when you [rework it].

We only like to put 20 percent rework in our donuts for flavor, and because our products are square, there’s very little from a scrap standpoint.”

Mel-O-Cream is under those same volumetric pressures for even more types of donuts. And it can be quite the puzzle when it comes to bringing the automation it needs from an output standpoint together with the optimal flexibility of human hands.

“We have a large diversity of products that we produce because customers expect a lot of different sizes and flavors,” Larson said. “When you look at automation, how does that fit into the complexity of manufacturing? You’ve got some stuff that’s straightforward, but one size doesn’t fit all. When you get into the speed at which you need to change things and be flexible, that’s what the next big puzzle piece is for everyone in our world.”

Hostess, the Lenexa, KS-based bakery behind the classic powdered donuts dear to the hearts of c-store shoppers, also juggles a wide range of product variety.

“Each of our donut products, which include more than 15 varieties of Donettes and Jumbo Donettes, is unique and requires different product and process specifications to deliver the desired flavor, appearance, texture, consistency, quality and cost,” said Darryl Riley, senior VP of quality, food safety and R&D at Hostess Brands. “Depending on the product, it may require different equipment.”

Although automated options with increased flexibility are hitting the market every day, there’s another element to consider: How do you weigh which ones are worth it when it comes to the production process? This is something Mel-OCream is thinking about, especially when it comes to filled products. Automation designed for donut filling is out there, but when a bakery is making a full suite of products, it can become a small percent of the total product base, making it easy for the bet to be worth more than the hand. But the team has been able to find a custom-fit formula when it comes to automation through working with companies such as Moline.

“It can be an exorbitant amount of money to invest for the amount of volume you have against it as you start to look at the cost benefit and ROI of things,” Larson said. “It can be a tough sell.

© Matthew Feene on Unsplash

“Developing products is truly a full-time job if you want to keep up.”

Henry Lopez | plant manager | UDF Bakery

But in today’s environment, there are a lot of things driving it to be more beneficial from a cost standpoint such as the labor crisis.”

Although there are plenty of challenges on all sides, that doesn’t mean R&D is slowing down. Mel-O-Cream’s team, who partners with Dawn Foods as an ingredient supplier, were working on several new flavors throughout the pandemic, including bringing savory and sweet together for a well-rounded and delicious bite. It took a bit of a back seat as the pandemic began, but Larson looks forward to the innovation resuming on that road.

“It’s really different for this category,” Larson said, “adding more of a savory flavor into a predominately sweet type of product. That play on flavors took front and center in the donut world. As the pandemic came in, we had to be a bit more pragmatic, especially as demand at our core base business went up. But we will go back down that road. There are ideas there that are still cooking, and I think they will come together in the end.”

Lopez said that UDF’s team is on that same wavelength. Also with Dawn Foods, the team is working on the sweet and savory trend as well, along with many others. They recently hired a full-time R&D employee, devoting new resources to push their flavor innovation further and gear up to take on co-packing business.

“Developing products is truly a full-time job if you want to keep up,” Lopez said. “Dawn Foods has their Innovation Center to support product development efforts, and they really understand those ingredient trends and data that says what type of products can come from a particular ingredient. They work really well with our R&D team.” Hostess takes a similar approach to flavor innovation, sticking to what consumers know and love about the brand, but also pushing those flavor trends that are gaining prominence.

“Our R&D, consumer insights, marketing and manufacturing teams work closely together to identify trends and unmet needs such as flavors, inclusions and texture that we can address through innovation,” Riley said. “For example, knowing consumers are interested in new sources of energy, we recently introduced a caffeinated donut that’s available in convenience stores nationwide.”

As the world welcomes 2022 and rejoices in last year being in the rear view, only time will tell where the donut category will go. But evidence shows that this sweet good will have a place in consumers’ hearts and plenty of resources in the bakery. CB

© Tijana Drndarski on Unsplash