A large pie manufacturer contacted us about a serious issue they were having with an existing European convection oven. The oven was only a few years old and it was not meeting the production capacities promised by the supplier. To make matters worse, the mild steel oven construction and the limited access to the oven interior made cleaning the existing oven very difficult, if not impossible. The production process required the oven to be cleaned frequently to meet sanitation standards and the inability to properly clean the oven was a major concern for the customer.
We explained to the customer that at BABBCO we offer ovens that are built with USDA washdown construction. Ovens with this design offer multiple, full-sized oven access doors for easy cleaning and maintenance. They feature a full-seam welded 304 stainless steel washdown interior with sloped oven floors to enable pressure washing. After showing the customer how easy it would be to clean a BABBCO oven, we then had to guarantee the customer that the new BABBCO tunnel oven would meet their production capacity requirements. To satisfy this concern, we scheduled a full week of baking tests at the C.H. Babb technical center. Utilizing the technical center, we were able to establish product-specific bake times and oven settings, confirm product quality and throughput, and determine the exact oven build requirements. This process allowed us to eliminate the customer’s concern of falling short of the production requirements. In fact, we found our BABBCO Air Impingement Tunnel Oven actual reduced the baking times by 28% compared to the customer’s existing oven.
The next step was to find a way to remove the existing oven and install a new oven while minimizing the downtime of the production line. The BABBCO oven replacement program was the perfect solution. The BABBCO installation team was able to remove the existing 13′-wide x 170′-long (useable hearth dimensions) European convection oven and install a new 13′-wide x 170′-long (useable hearth dimensions) BABBCO Air Impingement Tunnel Oven in just 7 days. With no expansion of the plant footprint, the oven replacement both reduced baking times and increased production capacity by 28% and the customer no longer had an issue meeting their oven sanitation standards.
