So after scaling the raw materials properly, a mixing of the ingredients together to form the required dough for baking is carried out.

Originally, the dough was mixed manually with hands and then it evolved into a mechanized process that has given way to a technologically driven process. I will not bore you with the evolutionary trend of dough mixing. It suffices to state here that more a large number of small bakers in Nigeria are still using the manual method of dough preparation. One can only go so far with this method. I must also add that for bakers that are serving a market segment that is not interested in superior quality bread, this process is adequate. You must however also arm yourself with a milling machine in order to ensure that some dough elasticity is at least attained.

Let it also be known here that there are serious limitations to the this very manual process on of them being the fact that the energy and man hours required are indescribable and yet the quality is still wack.

Again, the lack of capital has been so over-flogged that it is no longer tenable in this day and age. Ignorance of the existence of improved technology and the options in acquiring them may be the greatest culprit among backward bakers.

Many thanks Op.

ONNYX:
In contrast to your expectations the very first equipment I will discuss is not the Mixer but some other nondescript equipment that is really small and yet very important to the overall product quality...and quantity (volume).

I will leave you to guess and tell us what equipment this could be.

From my cake and pastry making experience it will definitely be a scale

ONNYX:
The most fundamental tool required in every good bakery operation is working scale be it digital or manual.

Appropriate recipe replication must be done with the right scaling capabilities and instruments.

So whatever the case may be this very important tool cannot be over-emphasized.

Fortunately this scales have become very cheap thanks to countries like China, Taiwan etc.
You can get a really good table top digital scale for a reasonable price.

When buying a scale I advise that you buy one that can at least accommodate a maximum load of 30 - 40 KG.

Eventually you will need more scales as the business expands. So there is no end in sight to scales acquisition.

Lol..u mentioned it already

God bless u so much ONNYX

please like the posters above mentioned ..


Please don't be discouraged


This thread is going to be explosive ..



I have been baking cakes and pastries


I want to diversify into bread production as an additional source of income..


I would learn a lot and also share my experience in this thread


God bless onnyx

God bless this thread

God bless Nairaland.

Oktane:
Many thanks Op.

The pleasure is mine. Ive wanted to do this for a while but just couldn't muster the courage to do it.

Please bear with me as I progress gradually. I will attempt to cover as much ground as possible but it will be gradual but very thorough.

I will feel very fulfilled if a few people can benefit from the thread.

lifenajeje:



From my cake and pastry making experience it will definitely be a scale

You are very correct. The truth is that the scale is one very nondescript apparatus that is more often than not ignored.

Its functionality and contribution to overall product quality cannot be over-emphasized.

Without this tool working in a most efficient and effective manner, what will become of your final product is
better imagined than experienced.

Kudos to you for understanding and appreciating the role of this ubiquitous yet very undermined apparatus.

Good job, ONNYX. I'm very happy with this thread. I own and run a small bakery. I will gladly share my little experience when necessary. Kudos.

donmajor2:
Good job, ONNYX. I'm very happy with this thread. I own and run a small bakery. I will gladly share my little experience when necessary. Kudos.

The pleasure is mine.

Posting your experience here will be appreciated.

Indeed, I will be very happy if you can share your experiences no matter how small your operation may be,

A lot of people are desirous of getting to that your level.

And you could learn a thing or two from other peoples experiences here.

@OP,May God bless you.

You are doing a wonderful job here.
I am interested in bread flour milling.
But I need where I can acquire knowledge to excel in this field. I can easily get contacts from wheat traders from Russia and and other Eastern European countries to supply me with wheat.There are many variaeties of wheat grains. I don't know the one that is ideal for bread flour, cake s and doughnuts. I have a small milling factory but we only mill beans,plantain and Oat flour. I want to diversify into milling bread flour and making it available for bakers.Any suggestions (online or offline) of where I can get information about bread flour milling and best type of wheat for it will be appreciated.

Hope to get your reply on this.

adultiph:
@OP,May God bless you.

You are doing a wonderful job here.
I am interested in bread flour milling.
But I need where I can acquire knowledge to excel in this field. I can easily get contacts from wheat traders from Russia and and other Eastern European countries to supply me with wheat.There are many variaeties of wheat grains. I don't know the one that is ideal for bread flour, cake s and doughnuts. I have a small milling factory but we only mill beans,plantain and Oat flour. I want to diversify into milling bread flour and making it available for bakers.Any suggestions (online or offline) of where I can get information about bread flour milling and best type of wheat for it will be appreciated.

Hope to get your reply on this.

This is very interesting. I am impressed. I have heard of a few small efforts at Flour Milling in Ikorodu, Sango Otta and Sagamu.
The Aba/Onitsha nexus has the greatest concentration of small to medium sized millers.

I will respond in detail to your post later today. At the moment I can only say Kudos to you for already being on track. I will further encourage you to stay on track as you have made one of the best decisions you can imagine as regards business. What you need to do now is just to retain your traction and intensify your focus on your ultimate goal.

Lets revisit this later.

ONNYX:
In the wake of this fast food boom we also had a few specialized bread shops springing up in different locations too with catchy names and located in places where you could not miss them. They served a potpourri of products with their emphasis on family sized breads but at really above the mark prices.

In all of this, a support industry also evolved and equipment supplier representatives set up shops, special raw material shops also sprang up and a cluster of these sales guys created market clusters.

Some major equipment manufacturers set up shop and started serving the bludgeoning market.
Of course there also developed a vibrant second hand market for equipment of sorts.

Equally important was the development of expertise for repairs and sometimes fabrication solutions.

Along the line came a revolution in our shopping culture with the berthing of the shopping malls in Nigeria. Big shopping brands launched here and some of them came with their in-house bakeries and further took advantage of the gaps for superior quality bread.

All of a sudden, it was like there was a total reawakening with queues growing longer by the day. A visitor to Nigeria would be led into thinking that bread had just been discovered in Nigeria.

I can tell you that this is just the beginning and the end is not in sight. We need hundreds of new and really large bakeries. In the course of our deliberations I will bring in snippets of information extracted from the results of varied and different research efforts I have been privileged to partake in this industry during the course of many years.

One thing I hope we all can learn from this thread at the end of it is that the product bread has an inelastic demand and that the product supply is yet to meet the actual national demand. This may not appear as the case to the untrained eye but I can assure you that there are a few tricks and intrigues in the business which only experience or a proficient guidance can unveil. Open your eyes wide and you will notice that new labels are being launched everyday and honestly they are all selling one way or the other.

Quite frankly, some bakeries are also closing down too. We shall examine the reasons why this is happening and I will bring some examples from to support my thesis. Some of these examples will be drawn from Nairaland.


It has indeed a wonderful phase.

I just though I should mention this as I found it quite intriguing;

This morning I decided to go for my monthly grocery shopping and chose Grand Square on Mobolaji Johnson, Ikeja primarily because we would not be struggling with the Weekend crowd in Ikeja City Mall.

While my significant other was going around from shelf to shelf I decided to do what I enjoy most which is observing the buying pattern of the shoppers and identifying which products was literally flying off the shelves.

To my amazement, the bread segment enjoyed the highest patronage. The crowd (well organized) was quite impressive. A close examination revealed that the highest selling bread there was the family sized loaf which sells for about 250.00 on the streets. Guess what? The one from Grand Square sells for a price tag of 450.00 and it was literally not enough for the crowd. And the oven was churning out more. For all we know that price could have increased to 500.00 and it wouldn't make any difference. The demand would be the same.

By the time we were loading our vehicle I noticed that our own purchases included 4 loaves of the same bread and two loaves of the Special fruit bread. All this led my thinking back to this thread and what the OP said about the fact that we do not as of yet have enough bakeries in Nigeria. This is food for thought. Op is probably right, there is quite some room for more investment in bread making.

following

The Spiral Mixer

This is a very important machine. I do not wish to bore you with the history and evolution/development of the Spiral Mixer but I would like to just state the fact that this machine has come a long way, undergone a lot of changes and finally arrived as the most preferred ingredient mixing apparatus for the contemporary commercial bread maker.

Essentially it is a machine that has a large bowl and a spiral. Both the Spiral and Bowl are in motion when the process f mixing is activated. Summarily, let us just say that no modern day Industrial kitchen with bread as its main product will lack a functional Spiral Mixer.

This equipment comes in different sizes. They are classified using their capacity; either overall dough weight of flour input. In most developed settings what is used is the dough weight with/or flour weight.

In Nigeria what is more prevalent amongst bakers is the use of the standard 50kg flour bag as the unit of measuring the capacity of the mixer. So one will hear such descriptions as ‘half bag’ mixer, ‘one bag’ Mixer and ‘Two Bag’ Mixer which simply represents 25kg, 50kg and 100kg respectively.

When choosing your first mixer, a lot of variables must be considered. We will examine some of them here.

Appropriate Mixer Size/Capacity for your operation;
It is important that you choose what is nearest to your needs. Please do not buy a 1 bag mixer if you are starting out small. If you do you will be attracting diminishing returns. The mixers are designed to operate at optimal capacity. If you use a 50kg (1 bag) capacity mixer for a 25kg flour mix the process will take a longer time than what would ordinarily be required for a 50kg flour quantity for which the mixer was originally built for. It will take almost double the normal time if you require it to give you the best quality dough for your bread.

Spiral/Bowl Rotation Speed:

The speed of the mixer Spiral is very important as regards the overall dough quality. When the mixer is in operation it is designed and calibrated to work in such a way that it makes a specific number of turns per minute.

If it makes more than that then you can be sure that what you will have is a compromised dough quality. If the spiral turns are too slow, the dough will end up being heated up by the spiral which is referred to as ‘cooking’.

Some bakers have no clue about this. If you have been trained appropriately or perhaps lucky and you establish the exact number of turns required for the dough mix process and convert this to a fixed time frame your product will be one to die for and you will never meet demand.

For a Standard medium sized bakery operation, I usually advise that one procures at least two Mixers; a 12.5 Kg (Quarter bag) and at least one 50Kg (one bag) mixer. Note that the reasons behind this option are more of operational than economics.For instance if you have tecnical issues with your large diesel generator, a small electric generator (3.5 -5Kva) can power the small mixer while you fix the diesel generator. This will save you from the embarrassment of not being able to fulfill orders.

Some days are slow baking days and you probably bed to slow down on your production volume. At that point what you need to do is to revert to your small generator and produce less with the smaller machines.

Where the above is not feasible then steer the middle course, get a one bag mixer and grow from there.

For the smaller startups you could go with the 12.5kg (Quarter bag) Mixers. Another very important consideration is the power. Mixers from One bag capacity and above require a three phase power source to power it. This means that you will require a three phase connection from the public power supply or a three phase diesel generator.

A petrol generator cannot power a three phase equipment.

God bless u so much

Thanks bro.Hope to hear from you soon.
Any information on this will be appreciated.

Thanks.

quote author=ONNYX post=71623334]

This is very interesting. I am impressed. I have heard of a few small efforts at Flour Milling in Ikorodu, Sango Otta and Sagamu.
The Aba/Onitsha nexus has the greatest concentration of small to medium sized millers.

I will respond in detail to your post later today. At the moment I can only say Kudos to you for already being on track. I will further encourage you to stay on track as you have made one of the best decisions you can imagine as regards business. What you need to do now is just to retain your traction and intensify your focus on your ultimate goal.

Lets revisit this later. [/quote]

THE DOUGH DIVIDER

The next equipment in the bakery process is the Dough Divider. As the name implies, this is a simple device that divides the dough into desired sizes and weight.

While it can be deduced that there is nothing special about this machine it would be important to state here that this is really a time and labour saver combined as one. Traditionally what was used was regular kitchen knives and scales to cut the dough to desired sizes.

As a matter of fact most small bakeries are still using the traditional method. It is quite a drudgery and it produces some losses in the overall production volume as a result of the significant human factor that come into play in the process. So the dough divider comes to the rescue. It divides the dough into the desired weight/size and this attained with just one simple depression of a lever.

It comes in either manual, hydraulic and electric versions. It is also denoted in terms of the capacity it will handle per cycle.

On the whole, the time and labour it saves you over time justifies the huge investment used to procure it.

May I also add that because it fastens the process of cutting the dough it enables the dough to be molded and placed in pans while still in its optimal post-mixing state.

THE DOUGH MOULDER;

All bread that is produced goes through a molding process. This is simply the rolling of the dough to attain the desired shape before it is placed in the pan or tray.

Dough molders come in different shapes and sizes reflecting the bread shape and size desired. The more contemporary dough molders can be easily modified to accommodate different shapes and sizes.

This is also another time and labour saving equipment. It also contributes to a uniform product quality ultimately. I would also like to describe it as heavy investment that yields maximum dividends over time.

THE PROOFER.

Proofing is simply getting the bread to undergo a proper fermentation process before it is introduced to the oven heat required to cook it to readiness. Put simply it is the action temperature and humidity on yeast to produce carbon dioxide.

Previously all manners of methods were adopted to prove the bread. Some of these methods now appear very hilarious but if the truth must be told these methods were very functional and yielded the desired results.

The Proofing oven or Proving Oven is a simple temperature and humidity control chamber that is used to catalyze the fermentation process for the dough by the yeast.

Simply described, the process involve the temperature facilitating the activity of the yeast which in turn acts on the dough to produce carbon dioxide thus making the bread rise higher and faster.

This is the biggest time saving device in the baking process.

Made of Stainless steel and glass, it appears very similar to a contemporary oven but differs only in function. It also comes in different sizes and shapes.

As a rule, you need more proofing capacity than oven capacity and the logic behind this is that the dough spends more time in the proofer than in the oven. Most breads proof manually over 3-4 hours (depending on variables which may not be limited to room atmospheric conditions, dough portions/size yeast percentile) while the artificial proofing takes about 40-60 minutes depending primarily on the settings.

Please note that even though the proofer is not a very expensive equipment it is still not a tool you cannot do without. As a matter of fact most medium sized bakeries in Nigeria have no need for the proofer oven as the atmospheric pressure in the baking facility is already dough friendly.

Happy Independence Day to everyone.
@ONNYX I'm going through your posts, re-drawing the set up and listing equipment specifications (energy demand only, as you haven't stated anything about jacketed vessels or external cooling). It helps that you're stating which is necessary and which is advantageous, though I'm still not sure what can actually be bypassed.
In all (and I apologise ahead for this), I'm already totalling cost.
I have a question...is manual, open-air transfer of material between stages possible/the low-cost practice until oven-baking?

THE OVEN;
I suppose this is the undisputed king of baking equipment.
The oven is the most popular among all bread processing equipment.

Its function is quite limited and it is primarily for the cooking of the bread after all the processes have been put in place.

A proper analysis of the oven will take several pages and also a lot of time. Some of the information may not be necessary for the purpose this thread is designed to achieve which is to stimulate further investment in the bread/bakery industry in Nigeria.

We will nonetheless still attempt an expose on the oven using different indices.

Please bear with me as it requires serious attention to detail and I may progress rather slowly as I am quite busy at this time.


Ovens can be categorized using different variables;

Size, energy source, energy dispensing mode, functionality among others.

We will attempt to analyze the oven using the above stated predicates.

connkg:
Happy Independence Day to everyone.
@ONNYX I'm going through your posts, re-drawing the set up and listing equipment specifications (energy demand only, as you haven't stated anything about jacketed vessels or external cooling).

It helps that you're stating which is necessary and which is advantageous, though I'm still not sure what can actually be bypassed.

In all (and I apologise ahead for this), I'm already totalling cost.

I have a question...is manual, open-air transfer of material between stages possible/the low-cost practice until oven-baking?

I will respond to this in my next post. bear with me.

connkg:
Happy Independence Day to everyone.
@ONNYX I'm going through your posts, re-drawing the set up and listing equipment specifications (energy demand only, as you haven't stated anything about jacketed vessels or external cooling).


It helps that you're stating which is necessary and which is advantageous, though I'm still not sure what can actually be bypassed.
We will redo this segment as we progress and you yourself will come to terms with the necessities and those nice to have equipment.

In all (and I apologise ahead for this), I'm already totalling cost.


I have a question...is manual, open-air transfer of material between stages possible/the low-cost practice until oven-baking?

Its deliberate as I am focusing on a generalized and very rudimentary analysis that will be understood by all and sundry. For this reason I therefore didn't consider it necessary to deal with the complexities that you have raised.

Since we are here already I would like to state that there is absolutely no need for jacketed vessels at this level of operation. But external cooling is the last but one stage in the bread making process and for external cooling different kinds of apparatus will suffice.

Many bakeries make use of a simple wall fan which is more than adequate..

We will get to costing at some point in the discourse. Sooner than later. Its a really tricky area and I would rather approach it carefully. its a
most sensitive area and I do not wish to cause any disaffection or de-market anyone or his/her business. Thats not the purpose of this thread. I may however be persuaded to provide some guidance privately for those who want to embark on a equipment acquisition.

Yes, very possible and as a matter of fact this is the most realistic approach for the mini/medium bakery set-up.

I hope this deals with your concerns as highlighted?

Nairaland mods should know threads that are informative and should pin them for a period of time on that front page so that a lot of people can go through it. I just read from beginning to the present stage of this thread and I began to wonder what the moderator of this investment section has been doing. this thread is front page material and I implore seun and lalasticlala to look into this thread and give it the push it deserves. nice one bro

I'm really enjoying this thread... So educative
God bless you sir for the vital information you are giving out....I'm with you till the end

Ollyt75:
I'm really enjoying this thread... So educative
God bless you sir for the vital information you are giving out....I'm with you till the end

Thanks for the validation.

I am glad you find it useful.

The energy source of an oven is one very important way of classification.
There are all sorts of energy sources both traditional and contemporary.

Traditionally, we have the regular wood fired ovens which evolved into the charcoal fueled baking chambers.
You will be amazed with the fact that some really large bakeries still use this form of energy. I know really huge operations that insist on the firewood driven process. And guess what, some of the bakers are so proficient that the bread comes out so good it would be difficult for you to distinguish it from bread made with more contemporary and cleaner energy sources.
May I quickly add here that some of the firewood ovens have undergone significant modifications such that the old mud wall type of ovenm has given way to a more contemporary steel bodied chamber.

Charcoal is also a very common energy source for baking bread.
Chacoal lumps/briquettes are used to energize the oven. These types also make use of steel chambers and work very well.
While the commercial nature of the contemporary industrial bread production is more attuned to equipment that is driven by 'new energy'
the more specialized bakeries are still using the old type ovens. In France I have been to a bakers shop who uses a heated stone slab to produce his very specialized loaf which is also very expensive.

In the Germany, I know of a baker that uses a charcoal powered oven.

Thank you for your response, ONNYX. You answered my product transport concern. A lot of financiers and engineers are already on this thread, I believe.

Please I have another question: Do you have any experience with locally-produced breadmaking equipment?

I reached friends at NASENI/SEDI, Enugu (he's now at Abuja) and FIIRO, Lagos and they both say they have versatile kiln designs. (Designed, fabricated/ machined and tested locally, completed with Technical Sheet and SOPs).
I have actually eaten sample bread baked at FIIRO at one of our NSChE meetings.
NASENI website appears to have a problem, but FIIRO's is up. http://www.fiiro.org/

Kudos to you ONNYX for a well delivered piece on bakery, we need more of your type to help shield more educative light on different businesses, cheers bro I feel you

ifortenet:
Kudos to you ONNYX for a well delivered piece on bakery, we need more of your type to help shield more educative light on different businesses, cheers bro I feel you

The pleasure is mine.

I am glad the effort is yielding some results.
I hope you consider the business worthwhile enough to invest...........at any level.