A Philadelphia Tradition Goes Green: TASTYKAKE

Senior Vice President of Strategic Operations Autumn Bayles (left) and Director of Quality, Research and Development John Sawicki take a few minutes break to demonstrate a vintage Tastykake delivery vehicle.After meeting in the front lobby, the public tours will trek up the stairs into the visitors’ mezzanine, where interactive electronics tell the history of the almost-100-year-old baking company, museum-type display boards detail the LEED efficiencies designed into the abandoned-building-turned-modern-bakery, and the processing of Butterscotch Krimpets and Tastykake cupcakes can be viewed from ingredient to package.

While many food and beverage manufacturers have windows through which parts of their process can be viewed or allow public tours into specified areas, the glass-sided mezzanine overlooking Tasty Baking Company’s processes hides nothing. From the high-speed lines (with piece-per-minute ranges from 250 to 920) to the not-quite-complete, yet wholly functional quality assurance lab, the processing operations of Tastykake’s new 345,000-square-foot facility are open to visitors and inspectors alike. “From the mezzanine, you are able to see everything and assess it all,” said Autumn Bayles, senior vice president of strategic operations.

And in this bakery, opened last May and fully operational by July, “all” includes a vast array of features designed into the new facility. As overseer of the project, Bayles told QA last spring during an early phase of the build, “When you get to design a facility from the ground up, you have the liberty of putting things in the exact place you want as opposed to our [previous] facility where we retrofitted things that have changed over the years, that may not be as convenient or easy to use.”

Just as Tastykake has found success in creating all its baked goods from scratch using only the finest ingredients, so too has it found that building a facility from scratch with strategic design enabled it to successfully integrate industry-leading features for efficiencies in sustainability, sanitary design, food safety and food defense.

Sustainability. In both the bakery and corporate offices of the new building, sustainability is a primary focus, with an eye toward LEED standards. Introduced by the U.S. Green Building Council in 2000, the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environment Design) Green Building Rating System is a voluntary, consensus-based national rating system for developing high-performance, sustainable buildings.

With LEED Gold-Certified corporate offices and a LEED-registered bakery, the Philadelphia Navy Yard building is considered to be the world’s largest “green” bakery. Constructed from scratch, Tastykake built a number sustainable features into its design, including:

• The existing buildings on the site were demolished and the non-hazardous waste materials were reused as site fill.
• The re-use of existing land gave it LEED brownfield-site designation—defined as “damaged sites where development is complicated by real or perceived environmental contamination, reducing pressure on undeveloped land.”
• Through its sustainably designed low-flow, high-efficiency plumbing for water-use reduction and smaller footprint, Tastykake has realized water savings of 40 percent in comparison with its old facility, said John Sawicki, director of quality, research and development
• Floors are coated with an epoxy finish to protect against cracks and crevices in which bacteria could grow. “The epoxying of the floor is meant to keep the floor from being breached,” Bayles explained.
• A computerized indoor air quality management system monitors temperature throughout the building to maintain an optimum environment in each area. In addition, the walls separating the hot baking area from the cool packaging area is insulated and bounded by metal panels on each side of the wall.
• About 98 percent of the equipment used in processing was purchased new. All were selected and customized as a part of the overall strategy to meet Tastykake quality, safety and sustainability standards.
• The five cake ovens, all of which are new, are equipped with automatic conveyor washers, which spray down the equipment at the end of a shift, running at the same speed as the baking cycle—taking about 25-30 minutes. “The water for the system utilizes heat from the hot oil thermal system of the oven,” Sawicki said. At the end of a production cycle, the oven is cooling down, but there is enough residue heat to provide for effective cleaning. “We are maintaining efficiency by using the heat that is already built into the system.”
• And the cake-oven heat itself is recycled through a thermal heat, oil-recycling, closed-loop system. “The oil runs in a continuous loop through the oven and does not need to be replaced,” Sawicki said. “We are probably the largest bakery in the country doing that.”

Sanitary Design/Food Safety. The sloped floors and trenched drains of the processing areas are considered to be one of the new building’s most beneficial designs. The floors slope downward toward trenched drains which are placed between each of the bakery’s seven lines.

“Each line can be easily hosed down and washed down and all the particulate matter will flow into the trenched drains,” Bayles explained. This not only creates a natural flow of the water to the drain, but eliminates the need to squeegee wet floors.

Other sanitary design includes:

• Clean ceiling – Above the entire processing area is a drop ceiling which encloses the pipes and lines, virtually eliminating condensation and debris contamination from above. “We call it a clean ceiling,” Bayles said. “It allows us to keep all debris and dust above it—and it is washable too.” •
• A floor-painted line and color-coded trash bins define the separate processing and non-processing areas—and related cleaning systems. “Wet cleaning stops at the blue bins. We only do dry cleaning after that, in the packaging areas, with sensitive robotic equipment,” Bayles said.
• The dry cleaning is conducted with compressed air hoses, connected to a compressed air tank that sits high above the processing area, with drop points strategically placed along the lines for dry cleaning in, around and under equipment.
• Each cake oven is equipped with an automatic pan-washing system. After each batch of cakes, the pans rotate upside down to the bottom of the oven. There an air blower blows up into the pans for surface cleaning. “A lot of people will wash the pans after every cycle, we choose not to do that,” Sawicki said. Rather, he said, “the air hose runs constantly in between pan washes to keep the pans free of crumbs.”
• The automatic conveyor washers then do a thorough cleaning at the end of each shift. “It’s a pretty efficient cleaning system,” Sawicki said. “It will clean lightly soiled pans in one cycle, heavily soiled pans in two to three.” The cycles are determined primarily by the length of the run and the product that is produced.

Food Defense. Although the mezzanine provides a public view of Tastykake processes, the company built its new plant with a strict eye toward security as well as safety. The mezzanine can only be entered from the guarded lobby, and electronic lock doors stand between all processing and public areas. The facility was also designed to limit employee entrance and exit—for both food defense and food safety. “There is one main employee entrance, so all employees have to pass down the hallway and wash their hands as they come through,” Sawicki explained.

Building from scratch enabled the company to reach for the ultimate in green, and by the time the process was complete, Sawicki said, the strategic planning team included associates from all aspects of the organization. Planning began with the executive team, “then as expertise was needed in different areas,” he said, “others in the organization were brought into the group. As time passed on, more and more people were added to the team.”

As a result, the company not only achieved its sustainability objectives, but the design integration of safety, defense and quality have brought to Tastykake new, higher-reaching capabilities and ever-rising goals for the future.

The author is Managing Editor of QA magazine. She can be reached at llupo@giemedia.com.