Some people would say the concept of mass-produced artisan bread is an oxymoron, the term ‘artisan’ being seen to imply the bread has been made by hand, using traditional methods in small quantities. Deyrick Upton, CEO of Bread Solutions, would disagree. For him, the term refers to the quality. Admittedly, the quality of bread used to be dependent on it being made by hand and therefore in smaller quantities, however, Upton has developed a revolutionary production method that allows Bread Solutions to deliver artisan-quality bread to the masses.
“If you’re up in the hills of Italy and you go into a little hot-bread bakery you can see these wonderful [artisan] breads being made and because the dough is really sticky, they’re all made by hand on the bench,” says Upton. “What we’ve done is say ‘Okay, how can we take the craft that is deployed in making that bread and produce it en masse?’.
“For me, ‘artisan’ means a highly fermented, highly hydrated dough, whether it’s producing one an hour or 1000, if it meets that benchmark then it achieves that goal.”
Bakery Background
Upton started in the UK baking industry in 1978 as an apprentice baker and went on to study for a degree in bakery management and food science at the South Bank University in London. He moved to Australia in 1994 and worked for Bakers Delight for a decade before branching out on his own to set up Bread Solutions.
He says there’s much better access to specialised bakery training in Europe than in Australia and, as a result, the complexity and range of bakery products is much greater there. Bread Solutions aims to address this issue by creating artisan bread at its bakery in Braeside, Melbourne, and distributing it to Coles stores across the country, giving the supermarket the ability to sell high-end product without having highly skilled bakers in each store.
“This enables Coles to have a really good quality premium product in Sydney, Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide, but it also gives the supermarket in the top of Far North Queensland the ability to have exactly the same product range and quality.”
For a traditional bakery, there are three standard processes for preparing bread. With the scratch method, bakers work from around two in the morning to create bread from scratch in one process so it’s ready for their customers when the bakery opens. The use of frozen dough was initially positioned as the solution to this highly labour intensive and time-consuming process.
However, because the end-user still needs to defrost the dough, prove it and bake the bread, Upton says frozen dough doesn’t help to de-skill the process or speed it up significantly. The final option is par-baked products that can be placed straight from the freezer into the oven.
While this method is incredibly efficient, the lack of moisture in the product means it quickly goes stale.
With these processes, it’s a case of quality or convenience, but Bread Solutions’ novel ‘minute technology’ produces what it calls ‘par-bake plus’, offering the best of both worlds.
“Up until recently, Parbake hasn’t been a feasible option for industry,” says Upton. “What we’re able to do now looks like a traditional par-bake offering but gives the end user the same quality, consistency and shelf life that you’d expect from a scratch-baked product. In other words, it’s indistinguishable from a scratch baked product – but it’s a par-baked product.”
Recipe for success
The artisan quality of Bread Solutions’ products is dependent on three main factors – the recipe formulation, the enzyme technology and the state-of-the-art equipment it uses. To go back to that freshly baked artisan loaf being prepared by hand in the hills of Italy, the moisture and the stickiness of the dough are paramount.
The all-natural enzymes Bread Solutions uses in its dough help retain the moisture and engender crust regeneration to give the product an authentic crunchy crust. Bread Solutions has worked closely with the inventor of the enzymes and, Upton says, “We’re probably the only people in the world doing this”.
“Essentially, the more moisture you can get into the dough and the more fermentation you give it, the better the flavour profiles and the thickness of the crust,” says Upton. “That’s the key, but in order to do that you need really sticky dough and that’s notoriously difficult.”
Standard bread-making machinery is unable to handle the stickiness of the dough, however Bread Solutions has imported the latest equipment from Europe, including a state-of-the-art machine from the German manufacturer Fritsch, that is able to do so. Upton regularly makes overseas trips to view the latest bakery equipment on the market.
“We select our equipment very carefully, so we have equipment that, in my opinion, is a little bit unusual and a little bit different – we’re not aware of any plants in Australia that are quite the same – but the choice of equipment has been paramount [to the business],” says Upton.
The high-tech machinery is not just integral to the quality of the bread, it is also pivotal to the facility’s productivity and one of its machines is able to produce 24,000 Kaiser rolls an hour. Upton stresses, however, that Bread Solutions is not a fully automated plant and its operations are run by highly skilled bakers.
“If you come to our bakery you won’t see conveyers everywhere – that’s not who we are – we are a small bakery on steroids,” says Upton. “We have very large equipment, but it’s still a batch process and we very much rely on the skills of our people. Even though we’ve got great equipment, we need a high degree of skill to make product of that quality on a consistent basis.”
The Coles partnership
Bread Solutions is a dedicated manufacturer for Coles and Upton emphasises that, without Coles, it couldn’t have achieved its staggering growth of over 770 per cent in the last four years. In 2008, Coles director of merchandise John Durkan was looking for a bread producer to supply the supermarket with high-end gourmet bakery products and “on the back of a handshake” to take its products, Bread Solutions built its Braeside facility. Since then, its staff numbers have swelled from 10 to almost 200.
Such is the success of their long-term strategic partnership that Bread Solutions doubled the size of its operations in January, taking on a second factory in Braeside, in order to meet the supermarket’s growing needs. Next year, Upton says, the company will most likely need a third factory and will probably need to move its operations as it will have outgrown its current location.
Having built what is probably the most cutting-edge bread business in Australia, Upton continues to bang the drum for innovation. With its second factory, Bread Solutions expanded its manufacturing capabilities allowing it to further ferment its doughs and start producing baguettes, which it will roll out in-store in the next few months. It also installed a state-of-the-art German stone oven, where the bread gets baked on the stone for an “even higher end product”.
With the demonisation of carbohydrates in the 1990s, bread has received some bad rap, but Upton emphasises that it’s an important part of a staple diet and Bread Solutions is actively trying to increase the nutritional value of its products. Its efforts include trying to find ways to reduce the GI of bread and reducing its salt content in line with the Food and Health Dialogue’s targets.
Upton explains that salt reduction is quite a complex business, because salt carries out a multitude of functions, including helping with fermentation, building protein in the dough, and preserving the bread. However, he insists that Bread Solutions isn’t interested in extending the shelf life of its products.
“The shelf life [of our products] is ‘one plus one’ – you can buy it in the supermarket today and consume it any time tomorrow,” he says. “We’re not looking to have longer shelf life because the reality is that the only way to do that is add preservatives or put it into MAP packaging or something and we don’t believe in that.
“What we want is a very clean label product for the consumer.”
He approves of the French habit of buying fresh bread three times a day. “To me, that is the right way to consume bread,” he says. “Food has to be real, that’s really what’s driving us. We want to make sure the products we make are real not artificial. That means the way we produce them and the equipment we use.”
