The group has built a new cold store for its business unit Kara that specializes in frozen buns, rolls and doughballs for the food service and convenience sector as well as in-store bakeries and private label. The new facility doubles the company’s cold storage capabilities.
Fletchers said the move was to ensure the facilities matched customer standards.
“Cold storage is an essential part of the production process and our previous facility had become outdated. This is more energy efficient, enables us to handle products in a more orderly way with less movement and offers us a greater efficiency in dispatching the product to third party distributors,” said Jeff Dean, general manager at Kara.
The industrial bakery sector has started competing with the foodservices across the globe with in-store bakeries and packaged par-baked options for the consumer.
The global frozen bakery market is set to surge to $32.5bn by 2018 – driven by consumers opting for these ‘more reasonably priced’ frozen on-shelf products in place of baked fast foods.