Bulk-handling for bread makers: customized systems and unique flavors

CEPI has developed installations for all types of bread. From hard dough bread to soft dough bread, to yeast bread, sourdough bread, leavened bread, white bread, rye or wheat bread, corn bread, soda bread and flatbreads such as piadina and pitas, we provide the solutions and the food expertise needed to best handle ingredients and processes. One of the main factors we consider when designing installations is the preservation of food properties and flavor, an outlook that is built in the design of both our technologies and their automatization.

Our installations are used globally with very different customers and end products. CEPI brings to the table a universal knowledge of food and markets built through four decades of experience working internationally, and a network of local agents with highly specific knowledge of local processes and markets.

Depending on their needs, each food manufacturer will have their pick of storing and dosing solutions. Flour can be stored indoor or outdoor, in Trevira fabric or stainless steel silos suitable for big, medium and small production volumes. Our solutions are hygienic, safe, and suitable for any flour and materials such as quinoa, teff, amaranth, powdered milk and fibers which are frequently involved in bio productions.

We put the utmost care in protecting flour by only using suitable top quality materials and designing solutions that are easy to clean, with multiple filtering and sifting systems to enhance food security. They can be fitted with technologies such as double-jacketing or dehumidification for hygroscopic products. We perform a study of room temperature and humidity and provide our customers with instructions for the correct maintenance of their working environments.

Our welding technique prevents pollution and contamination in stainless steel equipment and our fabric silos employ antistatic HT Trevira fabric, with patented technology to ensure equipotentiality. We provide a hot treatment to sanitize our outdoor silos, which keeps microbiological and fungal level slow and has zero environmental impact

Our storing equipment is suitable for any flour (including rye flour, common wheat flour, durum wheat flour, gluten free flour, whole-wheat flour, oat flour, spelt flour, maize flour, rice flour, barley flour, millet flour, teff flour, amaranth flour, quinoa flour, buckwheat flour, bean flour, pea flour, lupin flour) and materials such as quinoa, teff, amaranth, powdered milk and fibers which are frequently involved in gluten free and bio productions.

Fluidization and cooling of flour

Flour will benefit greatly from the inclusion of technologies such as fluidization and flour cooling, to ensure natural maturation and stability of temperature.    

Correct and linear management of the dough temperature is essential in bread-making. Seasonal changes cause considerable variations to the temperatures of work areas and raw materials, impacting leavening times and creating unevenness in the finished product. CEPI offers a centralized cooling system for a gradual and automatic reaching of set temperature, based on the direct exchange of pre-cooled air through a fluidized bed and able to independently take the flour to the temperature required for further processing. This system eliminates the need for cooling agents such as cooled water or ice, which not only add unnecessary costs to your process but lead to instant decreases and unstable temperatures through time. The progressive cooling of the CEPI system guarantees higher stability and precision, and homogeneity in the dough with thermal exchange acting directly on every flour particle.    

All storing solutions can be equipped with a fluidization system that allows for chronological extraction with FIFO logic, greatly enhancing the traceability process. The flour oxygenation operated by the fluidized bed leads to a crucial improvement in the quality of the flour, with a faster but natural maturation that improves the flour’s rheological properties without using additives. Fluidized flour is much better for breadmaking, with better responses to all treatments from dough preparation to fermentation. The dough is more elastic and easier to work. It absorbs water more easily and keeps gas in more easily during leavening. Bread made from well oxygenated flour is softer thanks to a more alveolar product, and more digestible as oxygenation allows for longer leavening. 

Accurate and flexible dosing

Accuracy is the ultimate goal of any good bulk-handling for the food industry. The flavor of each product needs to be protected, and all safety and health concerns regarding ingredients need to be met.  

The systems we provide for bakery lines provide high accuracy both in dosing of macro ingredients such as flour and that of minor ones such as aromas and inclusions. Our automatic dosing systems cover every operation from loading to dosing, ensuring the repeatability and precision of the recipe, and as mentioned, we provide FIFO management for all products (even unpackaged ones) and full traceability for macro, medium and minor ingredients both powdered and liquid.  

As well as the automation, we provide Trimix, a broad spectrum dosing solution for micro ingredients, as well as a blending and premixing station that can be used both to mix ingredients before dosing or in place of the dosing hopper.  

Trimix is capable of handling a wide range of challenging materials such as powder milk, powder cocoa and salt. Trimix supports very diverse recipes, with accurate dosing of salt, improvers, aromas, spices, starch, inclusions, and other additives commonly used in bio and gluten free baking such as xanthan gum, lecithin, psyllium and cellulose. It has an easy-to-clean design with air blade system to clean the bearings, and comes with technologies to prevent leakage in the surrounding environment and leftovers within the storing units or scale. It is suitable for continous dosing in big production lines, without clogging or the formation of bridges even for hydroscopic ingredients such as crystal sugar.   

If you decide to mix ingredients before dosing, our 3 in 1 station is the solution for you. The 3 in 1 station weighs the ingredient, separates air from product during pneumatic transport and at last blends, all in single unit. The vertical blender inside is a system for the production of premix that ensures the highest flexibility across a wide range of food sectors, optimizing mixing and production times as the blend is already homogenous before reaching the mixer. It is fast, accurate and clean, delivering a homogeneous mix of powders even for quantities lower than 1% in the span of 3-5 minutes. 3 in 1 can also be used in place of the dosing hopper, and its speed makes it very suitable for continuous mixing systems.  

Fermentation and sourdough

Sourdough bread is tastier, more fragrant and healthier. Easy to digest and with a high nutritional value, it achieves a long-shelf life without preservatives, meeting the increasing demand for food manufactured through processes that preserve and enhance the natural properties of its ingredients.

Rye, wheat and multigrain breads but also pizza, focacce, brioches and crackers: in the last two decades, the defining factor in bakery manufacture has been the rediscovery of sourdough, and the development of technologies that make artisan quality possible on an industrial level.

CEPI’s fermentation technology include fermenters and bread re-work dissolvers for sourdough, as well as pre-dough and poolish. Our systems deliver precision and full control of all processes, as well as standardization and repeatability of procedures. They can stand-alone or be easily integrated in the production process, allowing for bread making through both direct method and indirect two steps method, according to the needs of the manufacturer.

Modular and suitable for small, medium and big production volumes, our systems allow food manufacturers to produce healthy, natural and aromatic products while saving space, manpower, additives and yeast. The technology fully preserves the characteristics of the raw materials and meets the highest standards of hygienic production.

Automation with PLC control, with a flexible management that allows for both automatic and manual options for all operations.

Fully integrated automation

CEPI provides a turn-key system that includes full automation.  The accuracy of our automatic dosing systems ensures precision in the dough, protecting the unique flavour of each recipe, and includes FIFO management of ingredients which greatly enhances the traceability process.  

The design of the dosing system is a delicate process that requires a close analysis of all the manufacturer’s processes in order to fully optimize their production. Not only is all of our hardware and software design done  in-house, but we have refined this process to perfection. The systems we design are customized to match analysis of raw materials, site evaluation, environment and consumptions in order to guarantee taste and integrity of the final product. They cover all operations from loading to conveying to dosing, as well as operations such as washing or climatizing. 

On top of repeatability and constancy in the recipe, our automated systems provide full traceability of materials, enhance communication with other software and ERP, reduce consumptions, powders and pollutions, generally improve hygiene with total separation between production and warehouse, improve working conditions and reduce human error, optimize space in the production area and warehouse. Last but not least, our systems are easy to adapt or expand including the addition of new ingredients due to the flexibility of the process. 

CEPI’s touch panels can be fully customized and are developed across both Siemens and Allen Bradley platforms. They handle recipe creation and management, ingredient and hopper parametrization, synoptic overview with real time status and maintenance of utilities with manual command, loading of silos and other stations, and any other functions like washing and climatization. Other options include CEPI’s native PLC and weighing processor with LCD display, for standard operations and one-line production processes.  

CEPI’s native software Tracking System provides complete traceability including digitalization of all ingredient movements, lot control with barcode system and warehouse management, greatly enhancing food safety and the optimal management of related alarms. Receiving and visualizing data from the touch panels managing the production, Tracking System creates a history of storing and recipe production operations, providing production analysis with statistics of ingredient consumption, batch report with deviation analysis, stock visualization and dynamic graphics illustrating product, recipe or lot trends.  

CEPI’s automation system is interconnected and can exchange information with any third party in the line. Our solutions provide full horizontal and vertical integration, managing dialogue and data among our devices and those of other partners, after the dosing and before the raw ingredients management. All our data can be easily integrated with global ERP to achive organization-wide traceability. It can generate important information for not only for the production departments and management, but for departments such as Quality Control (lot usage information for each raw material) and Purchases (schedule of raw material purchase, spare part purchase).   

Scrap rework and sustainability

Reworking production scraps is good for the planet and for your production process, with less material consumptions and reduction of waste. CEPI aims to produce sustainable technologies and provides multiple solutions to recover scraps, including systems for bread and both dry and liquid recovery of biscuit products. 

Our bread rework system can be used for bread as well as similar products such as toasts, loaves and sandwiches and its final product can be fed back into production in place of flour, sold, used for animal feed, or worked again to produce croutons or bread crumbs. The system includes loading, drying, cooling, grinding and storing with temperature control as well as pneumatic conveyance.  

All CEPI’s rework technologies are fully automated and ensure a high quality end product with no loss of food properties.   

A family-run company with an international outlook, CEPI is based in Italy and operates globally, with offices in Malaysia to coordinate operations in the Asian market and a network of local partners spanning the five continents. Since 1985, we have worked with the most important companies from all sectors of food manufacturing. 

Our vision centers research, customization and flexibility and our mission goes beyond assembling food machinery: we build turn-key installations that manage the production line from storage to dosing, all the while developing specialized solutions to match diverse and evolving needs across the planet. We believe in building lasting relationships for lasting projects, through an ongoing conversation which concerns all its aspects: from process and product analysis with hygiene and safety management and food technology support, to engineering and control, manufacture, installation and service.

If you are looking for a bulk-handling system to support your bread recipe, get in touch at cepi@cepisilos.com to discuss your project and get a quote. We are eager to build the perfect solution for your product!