[Cover Story] Consolidated Biscuit Company

"Baking here is pretty much like baking at home,” said Consolidated Biscuit Company Process Improvement Team Coordinator Don Green.

Whether the snacks are being made at home or in the 730,000-square-foot McComb, Ohio, facility of Consolidated Biscuit Company (CBC), the process is the same: Raw ingredients are mixed into a dough that is rolled out and cut into shapes, baked in ovens, cooled in lines, then carefully packed to retain its fresh-baked flavor.

In fact, baking at CBC is very much like baking your Grandma’s secret recipe cookie at home — when you know she’ll taste it.

CBC is the largest privately owned bakery in the United States. Though its products hold prominent placement on retail shelves across the country and around the world, its name is little-known outside the baking industry. However, CBC is an integral part of its customers’ manufacturing network, because its specialty is producing low-run product for major brands.

“We’re making product for our customers who aren’t here right now,” Green explained. “Our name isn’t on the product; their name is on the product.”

So, just as you’d anxiously await Grandma’s first bite of the cookies you baked from her recipe, CBC also must ensure that each cracker and cookie it produces meets the taste, quality expectations and specifications of its customer’s brand as well as those of the end consumer.

That CBC’s recipes call for 1.3 million pounds of flour in a single week; that the snacks are baked in ovens that would extend a half mile if placed end to end; or that more than 425 batches of dough, crème, muffins and filling are baked each day simply are technicalities of the end result — snacks that are as loved as home-baked ones; recipes as proprietary as Grandma’s favorite; and success that is measured “one bite at a time.”

While the basic process of cookie or cracker baking — mix, roll, cut, bake, cool, package — is the same from Grandma’s kitchen to CBC’s 41-acre bakery, the need for absolute consistency in the finished product requires such a preciseness throughout the process that even the most fastidious Grandma would find it difficult to match.

FROM ART TO SCIENCE. In fact, Green said, taking of the process from an art to a science, using the statistics and mathematics of Statistical Process Control (SPC), enabled the bakery to assess its processes to find discrepancies. Then, with the staff working together on solutions, the plant has been able to increase efficiencies throughout the manufacturing environment.

SPC is a quality tool that uses statistical techniques to monitor and measure process variation. Data are collected at various points in the process, then compiled into control charts where variation from specified levels quickly is discerned. The purpose of SPC is to detect and correct variations during the process that could impact the quality of the end product. SPC tools provide data and analysis that allow plants to make decisions for continuous improvement.

The bakery’s SPC system uses control charts at various points in its process starting right from the beginning. For example, said Director of Quality Assurance Max Jones, any change in dough mixing time or temperature can impact the quality of the end product — and the processes in between. By monitoring these with SPC control charts, precise and consistent dough temperatures and floor times can be maintained to ensure a consistent, quality product.

“Before we had SPC, it was more art,” Green said. “We relied on the experience and expertise of our people. But baking also is a science. If you do it the same way every time, you will get a consistent product.” A fact that is true, he said, of a dozen of Grandma’s cookies or a thousand-case run.

The trouble with relying on art is its subjectivity — its variation from person to person based on their own experience and expertise — and the impact that it has on consistency. Implementing the science-based approach of SPC, Green said, “has helped CBC monitor and track variation so we get a more consistent product. It is a shift from knowledge-driven behavior to data-driven behavior.

“SPC uses the logic that if something is out of control, you have to do something with the mechanics,” he added.

ELECTRONIC ENHANCEMENT. CBC began its move to statistical process controls with a traditional paper system, but it is gradually implementing and expanding electronic applications through the Hertzler System, which provides real-time data acquisition, analysis, charting and reporting of quality data, and helps the bakery employees more quickly detect process variation and quality issues. The system has greatly enhanced the bakery’s process, said Process Improvement Team Coordinator Dan Wells. “With a touch of a button, I can see everything.”

To set thresholds for the system, CBC determines the upper and lower levels for each particular measurement, and then tracks according to variation within these limits. “If an operator starts seeing data which is too high or too low, (the system) tells them that an adjustment needs to be made,” Green said. Because it provides electronic data storage of the measurements, control charts can be brought up at any time for review, and data can be accessed at a later date to respond to a customer query or for use in additional analyses.

FLEXIBLE CONSISTENCY. Because CBC’s business as a contract manufacturer means that it may be producing any one of thousands of products of a variety of brands at any time, the seeming contradiction of consistency and flexibility is critical to its success.

“Our customers need us to be very flexible,” Jones said. “We make (products) not large enough to have a dedicated line.” At the same time, however, those customers expect the products produced at CBC to maintain a consistent size, shape, texture and taste that consumers expect of that brand.

Flexibility, within standard processes, also enables the bakery to work with brands on new products that may have tight specifications but low runs, and so are not cost-effective for the brand-name manufacturer to run on its own lines. With its SPC tools, its flexibility and its baking experience, CBC is able to work with a brand’s R&D group to determine realistic specifications for a new product and quickly and cost-effectively run low volumes for test markets or other first runs. And if a brand doesn’t yet have all the answers, such as a smaller company that may have an idea for a new product but not have an R&D group or funding, CBC can take on the project earlier in the process and aid in its development.

“It helps to bridge the gap with new production, determine where specifications may need to be changed and help with the commercialization of the new products,” Jones said.

And once a product is in CBC’s system, its electronic data retention enables consistency no matter how infrequently it may be run. “If we run the same product next week, we can go back and review the old chart,” Green said. “It’s all about consistency.”

And to ensure that the operator is selecting the exact product being run, CBC’s electronic system includes a “picture book” — a data file of photos of the various products that are run in the plant, which includes photos of the packaging, labeling and details of all package parameters. “People really use that and it prevents a lot of mistakes,” Jones said.

“In this day and age if you want to compete, your technology has to be up to date,” Jones added, and with the number of product changes that can occur in a single day on a single line at CBC, quick detection and correction is critical, he said, explaining, “Yesterday we had eight changes on one line.”

DO-RE-ME. As The Sound of Music made famous in song, it’s best to “start at the very beginning — a very good place to start.” But instead of reading the ABC’s or singing Do-Re-Me, CBC moved its SPC to its lbs — that is, the mixing of its pounds of ingredients.

The massive Ohio bakery first began implementing process controls in its packaging area. But, Wells said, “the more we thought about it, the process really starts in the mixing area.” Standing in the company’s packaging area, Wells added, “everything we talked about back there really affects what happens down here.”

If something is out of control at the beginning, it will be out of control all the way through the process, but the more steps that are involved, the more difficult it is to find the problem and to cost-effectively correct it. For example, Green said, if the raw weight is not accurate before baking, it will affect the quality of the final cookie or cracker. Thus, using SPC at all critical stages alerts workers to inconsistencies and enables quality corrections. “If everything is correct and in control all along, you’re going to get a quality product,” he said. “Without SPC, something could change in the process and we would see it, but it would take us longer to see what happened.”

In fact, before SPC, the bakery had too many workers trying to correct a problem. Because they weren’t sure where it had gone wrong, four or five things could be in motion as everyone tried to make changes to fix the problem. Now, with the electronic system in place, workers can look at the control charts and know immediately where the fix needs to be. “SPC has given us a real-time tool for the operator and future operators,” Wells said.

THE HUMAN FACTOR. Despite the real-time value of SPC, it cannot replace real people. “SPC helps us recognize problems, but it doesn’t tell us what to do,” Green said. “It just tells us something is wrong. We still have to rely on the experience of the operators to make changes.” That is where the human factor, experience and expertise now come into play, he said. “If something is out of control, you have to use your experience to take care of it.”

A great deal of training has, in fact, been required to bring workers up to speed on the process, and understand why it is important and where their contribution lies. All CBC line leads, supervisors and operators went through classroom training where they were trained on the concepts of SPC, their roles in interpreting the data to control the process, and how SPC would actually help them do their jobs better.

As workers realize the benefits of SPC, they generally are eager to work with it. Wells said CBC explains to employees that SPC is a tool to make their job easier. “If you learn it and use it as part of your daily process control, your area runs better and you have less problems to deal with.”

The participation in training and the implementation of SPC has not only increased employee knowledge of process controls, he added, “it has heightened employee awareness in realizing the impact of what their job means to everyone.” Workers now realize that their immediate customer is the next worker down the line, and it is their responsibility to ensure the process is within designated levels of control before it reaches that next person.

Employees now are asking more questions about the process, product and general quality issues, which also has aided in continuous improvement, he said.

There were, however, cultural changes that had to take place to fully implement SPC. “The ability to use (data) to control the process and solve problems with this level of detail was totally new,” Green said. CBC brought technical people to the floor and took operators off the floor for team meetings and analysis.

In fact, to enhance the process, CBC created a cross-functional Continuous Improvement (CI) Team that includes representation from across departments. “The operators bring their knowledge and we bring the data,” Wells said. By putting the two together you can assess the problem, come up with a solution, and improve the ongoing process. “We brought the two worlds together.”

And it often is the operators on the floor who can provide the most value because they are the closest to the process. “If you listen to them and work with them,” Jones said one finds, “they have the answers.” And as all employees work more closely with the process, they are adapting to the changes and integrating the terminology.

In the past, if you were to ask an operator how it was going, the response would often simply be: “Okay.” Now the response is more likely to be: “The moisture was down.” Jones said, explaining, “They are starting to talk in more definitive data-driven communication.”

To a bakery with the primary purpose of producing another company’s recipe to the exact specifications of that brand and exact expectations of the consumer, the art of Grandma’s baking has nothing over the science of consistency through statistical process controls.

As the heir to any secret family recipe could tell you, Grandma’s recipe with detailed directions calling for as a “pinch” of this, a “small scoop” of that, mix until “set,” bake until “golden” and top with “remaining mixture” makes the art very difficult to duplicate. And if you’d be anxious about Grandma’s first bite of that batch of cookies, imagine awaiting the first bite by the CEO of the major brand whose national distribution you’ve contracted to run. QA

The author is staff editor of QA magazine.

A Brief Bakery History

1963 — Consolidated Biscuit Company begins operations in McComb, Ohio, with one oven and 25 employees who measure and add almost all ingredients by hand.

1967 — Now running on three ovens, CBC implements its first major modernization with the installation of bulk systems, designed to keep up with the ever-increasing output.

1972 — CBC produces 250,000 pounds of product per week.

1984 — Operating on seven cookie ovens, CBC continues to grow through the next two decades, adding a bread oven and five cracker ovens.

Today — With 14 ovens in operation today, CBC is the largest privately-owned bakery in the United States, producing baked goods that can be found on store shelves across the country and around the globe. CBC also operates cookie and cracker plants in Indiana and Kentucky; a nut and candy plant in Minnesota; an ice cream cone factory in Tennessee; as well as equipment-manufacturing, R&D, re-pack facilities and a restaurant/brew pub in Ohio.

Consolidated Biscuit by the Numbers

Employees: 1,200 to 1,400
Buildings: More than 730,000 square feet spread across 41 acres
Flour: 1,450,000-pound capacity in more than 13 silos, with usage of more than 1.3 million pounds weekly
Sugar:  More than 600,000-pound capacity stored in five silos
Mixers: 27 — producing more than 425 batches of dough, crème, muffins and filling every day
Ovens:  14 — which, if put end to end, would extend more than one-half mile long
Production:  More than 425,000 cases or 3 million pounds weekly
Shipments: More than 50 trucks are loaded every day
Items:  More than 500 different items using more than 150 different dough recipes