Waste reduction in laminated products

Waste reduction in crackers/laminated products

Reduce waste by optimizing laminating and cutting processes. Uniform dough sheeting and precise cutting tools minimize offcuts. Recycle trimmings into new dough batches, ensuring no quality compromise.

Lamination processes are designed in such a way that the development of dough continuous during the processing. The actual outcome and process parameters might differ from the desired product, its formulation and the desired amount of layers. These will in turn have an influence on certain environmental factors such as temperature. You can think of the following product examples:

·         Croissants

·         Danish

·         Puff Pastry

·         Biscuits

·         Crackers

An increase in layering will lead to more tension in the dough, then if the reduction steps are on the larger side it will lead to tearing in on the sides of the dough sheet. However even just a ‘simple’ too harsh reduction might lead to frays, threads or side tearings. These weak points continue down your production line and will force you to use a broader dough sheet have more trimmings (e.g. cut offs from the side). In most cases there is a limitation on the amount trimmings can feed back into your production line and resulting that the excess goes to waste or what happens also often and excess is fed back into the process leading to more waste: both trimmings as well as irregular shaped/ baked products.

The key of the solution here is to remove excess tension from the dough and although modern laminators have some automated tension reduction mechanisms quite often even that isn’t enough. Minimalizing tension will lead to smaller dough sheets and that in turn leads to less (side) trimmings.

Curious on how this can translate into your practice: check out our course on puff pastry and croissants or our cracker course.

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