Article

Lesaffre’s Technical Expertise

Is Your Bakery Experiencing Challenges?

Changing formulations, moving to clean label, or going organic can often lead to difficulties with new ingredients and processes. Let our team of baking experts help. Lesaffre has more than 100 years of baking and technical experience. Our Baking Center facilities have the capability to make a variety of products including: pizzas, tortillas, laminated dough (croissant), artisan style bread, par-bake and frozen dough. Our goal is to help guide and support our baking partners and customers to create successful product formulations that will solve your baking challenges.

Meet our Technical Team

Our technical service team travels to customer locations and will work with them to troubleshoot issues with formulation or manufacturing processes. In addition, customers can also send formulas/products to one of our Baking Center facilities for evaluation. Our Baking Center network is staffed with knowledgeable, skilled master bakers, as well as food scientists; all who have extensive experience in commercial baking and are recognized leaders in their fields.

Recently, Lesaffre was able to use their expertise to provide technical support to a customer who was facing the challenge of converting their white pan bread formula to clean label. The customer’s goal was to find a replacement for DATEM (diacetyl tartaric acid esters of mono-and diglycerides) and L-cysteine without compromising volume, pan-flow. and strength. Sherrill Cropper, PhD (New Product Development Lab Manager) worked with the customer to find a solution to remove these unwanted ingredients while still creating a dough that could undergo their processing conditions and produce a final product with a desirable volume. She developed a new dough improver to enhance volume that also addressed their clean label-friendly needs. “We were able to simulate their baking process by subjecting the dough to shear and adverse conditions in our Baking Center facility in Milwaukee. Once we developed the new dough improver, our technical and sales team tested it at the customer’s facility. After testing several batches of dough, the final loaves exhibited better performance than the customer’s current formulation. We were able to successfully meet the customer’s needs and expectations based upon their request”.

State of The Art Testing Equipment

Each Baking Center facility is equipped to produce every major yeast-raised product using any commercial baking process. The testing that our team of experts perform not only helps Lesaffre and Red Star develop new innovative products that meet market demands, but they also can help you by developing new products to meet your specific needs.

We can perform the following testing capabilities:

  • Mobile Risographs to take in the field. This technology evaluates the gassing performance of yeast
  • Flour quality check – enzymes, % moisture, mix time, absorption
  • Capabilities to evaluate final product quality through testing crumb structure, firmness, and volume (C-Cell, texture analyzer)
Customized Solutions

Facing our own challenges to continue to provide innovative baking ingredients; Lesaffre is excited to add a new blending facility that will allow us to:

  • Develop custom dough improver to meet market and manufacturing needs
  • Provide close technical assistance to customers
  • Improve our current product range and develop new products.

The new building will be up and running January 2018!

“We are proud of the latest investment to increase our capabilities to meet the needs of our baking customers,” said Tom Benner, president of Lesaffre Yeast Corporation. “Our Saf-Pro line of ingredients made in this facility will serve commercial, artisan and food service customers with the superior quality, clean label ingredients they have grown to expect from Lesaffre and Red Star.”

If your bakery is experiencing the challenges that come along with changing ingredients we are here to help. Let’s collaborate to address and solve your baking challenges, and consider new ideas and possibilities.

For more information, contact our customer support team!

 
Arnaud Deniaud • Director of Technical Services & New Product Development

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