The Prague Post
http://www.aaaradiotaxi.cz/index.php?xSET=lang&xLANG=2
October 13th, 2008
Endowment Fund     Business Listings ONLINE      Reservations      Classifieds    Subscriptions
Prague accommodation
Prague Art & Antiques Prague Art Prague Antiques
Prague Real Estate
Shuttle Bus to/from Prague Airport

Home » Archives » Business

Bread winner

Penam breaks into Bohemian market with automated bakery

By Michael Heitmann
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
January 9th, 2008 issue

VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST
Fresh-baked loaves of bread roll off the line at Penam's state-of-the-art facility in Herink.
enlarge
VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST
A Penam worker inspects moulded dough headed to the ovens.
enlarge
HERINK, CENTRAL BOHEMIA
In the purified atmosphere of a clean room, staff members check the fully automated production process on a touch screen, sorting out irregularities. The final product is treated with UV radiation, and its delivery is tracked using radio waves.
Instead of semiconductors, the final product of this facility are 350,000 fresh-baked rolls, set to leave this newly opened Penam bakery every day once it gears up to full production.
The bakery represents the company’s first move into its major competitor’s turf. Although Penam’s traditional stronghold is Moravia, the new bakery is located just outside Prague’s city limits, where United Bakeries operates a major production facility on Pekařská — baker street — in Prague 5.
 “We’re aware that we’re entering the most competitive territory in the Czech Republic, since purchasing power is concentrated in Prague and central Bohemia,” said General Director Jaroslav Kurčík. “But we want to become the market leader by 2010, and to reach this goal we have to take these steps,” he added.
To oversee its Bohemian incursion, Penam hired Kurčík as its general director in 2004, stealing him away from Odkolek, where he headed the bakery division. Delta Pekárny and Odkolek merged in 2006 to form United Bakeries, the current market leader and Penam’s primary competitor.
Kurčík has overseen Penam’s investment of 474 million Kč ($26.7 million) into the state-of-the-art facility, creating about 120 jobs in the small village of Herink. The bakery’s main customer is supermarket chain Billa.
Penam looks forward to increasing the competition in Bohemia, Kurčík said. The bakery’s customers, mostly local and foreign-owned supermarket chains, have been happy with its products in Moravia, he said, and welcome the opportunity to use the bakery’s services in Bohemia as well.
Because freshly baked products like rolls have to reach customers within as short a timeframe as half a day, delivery over long distances, such as to Moravia, would be both impractical and uneconomical.
Robots make the pies
At the Herink factory, not a single human soul gets involved from flour to finish — unless the machines go awry. This computerized process might appear soulless to the passing observer, considering the place bread occupies in European culture as a staple food: One need only think of the grandmother in Božena Němcová’s classic novel Babička meticulously blessing the bread before she bakes it.
Baking takes on a wholly different scale in Herink. Wheat flour fills up eight hoppers with a capacity of 60 metric tons (66 short tons) each, the equivalent of more than a week’s production volume. Instead of more common metal tanks, the flour sits in fabric, allowing it to “breathe” oxygen for approximately 10 days. And since flour dust suspended in air is potentially combustible — look it up — the fabric is lined with wires that discharge any static build-up.
Pipes connect the hoppers to a neighboring room where the yeast dough is kneaded and left to rise. Band conveyors transport the dough until it falls into moulds, where it’s left to rise. The bread or rolls are then fed on conveyor belts into an industrial oven, made by MIWE of Germany.
MIWE’s oven is unique in that it uses circulating thermal oil, which distributes the heat more uniformly across the dough than a conventional gas-heated oven. In addition, less heat is released to the surrounding air, as the thermal oil circulates in a closed circuit and is continuously reheated, saving energy.
While an automatic counter portions exactly 35 rolls into each waiting plastic crate, the bread makes a slight detour through a cooling spiral and the oddly named “happy slicer.”
Radio rolls
While the baking process is futuristic, the bakery’s tray system may be even more advanced. In a continuous cycle, the trays return from stores, go through the washer into temporary storage and then take in rolls or bread. A robot then stacks the trays before they go out on delivery once more.
Penam takes this system a step further by embedding an RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification) tag into the trays. As the rolls tumble into the tray, a computer sends out a radio signal via an antenna. The chip on the tray receives information about the kind and quantity of its content and stores it in memory. Readers can then track the tray’s course throughout the supply chain. Penam decided against using barcodes because they don’t fare well in the washer. In addition, the tags offer welcomed flexibility in an industry where demand is volatile.
The trays cost only about 70 Kč each, but, given that 200,000 trays are in circulation at any time across the country, the costs adds up. The RFID-equipped trays have a different form factor than standard trays, preventing them from being stacked and mixed up with trays from competing bakeries.
The majority of these trays carry rohlíky, oblong bread rolls treasured in both the Bohemian and Moravian parts of the country. Penam alone sells about 2 million of these a day, Kurčík said.
“Provided there are 10 million inhabitants [in the country], every fifth person eats one of our rohlíky,” Kurčík said. The price for this staple sits around 2.50 Kč, he said.
Food prices, which globally are at their highest since 1979, will never go down again, Kurčík said: “Along with the general improvements in the standard of living and rising wages, food prices will go up, at least in our segment.”
Meanwhile, potential supply shortages of agricultural commodities like wheat are unlikely to affect Penam.
“Because we are part of Agrofert Holding, a flour wholesaler, we can rely on secure flour supplies that cover our total production,” Kurčík said.

Michael Heitmann can be reached at mheitmann@praguepost.com


Other articles in Business (9/01/2008):

Browse the Current Issue

If you enjoyed this article, why don't you subscribe to the print version!
We accept secure online transactions provided by PayPal and Moneybookers

Be the first to add a comment!


Full Name: *
City: *
E-mail: **
This comment can be published in the print version of The Prague Post
Enter the text on the right:
 visual captcha
Comment: *
* Required field. In order to be approved for display, comments must have a first and last name and a city.
** E-mails are required and will only be used for internal purposes.

Most visited in Business Listings

Hotel booking
The Prague Post Online contains a selection of articles that have been printed in
The Prague Post, a weekly newspaper published in the Czech Republic.
To subscribe to the print paper, click here.
Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited.