Country Maid Gains Production Intelligence to Meet Growing Demand for Hand-Braided Pastries

Just as they have been for the past two decades, workers at Country Maid still braid their distinctive pastries by hand for fundraising groups across America. But thats the only part of the process that remains manual.

Ken and Marlene Banwart, the couple who founded Country Maid in 1991, began making pastries in their basement for the local farmers market. The baked goods quickly became a local hit. Thats when the Banwarts realized their pastries could have wider appeal. They began freezing the raw pastries and creating new varieties, ranging from tart apple to cream cheese fillings, to be sold to nonprofits and school groups for fundraising activities.

The pastries are popular because they have a homemade taste and warmth. People let the frozen dough rise over night, put it into the oven to bake, and then enjoy it. Not surprisingly, the process for turning the ingredients into these tasty pastries is far more complicated.

In 2012, Country Maid decided to invest in an automated facility to respond to consumer demand for the Butter Braid pastries.

Inside the Iowa facility of the now 100 percent employee-owned company, ingredients like dry milk, flour and sugar are stored in multiple holding bins and are transferred into an industrial mixer where theyre combined with water. The mixture then goes into a rotary dough feeder that transfers it down a conveying line. Much like a rolling pin, a machine then spreads and layers the dough, which is then topped with butter and filling. Just before it is moved to the freezer, a worker puts the final touch on the 12-layered pastry, intertwining the top layers to create the signature look of the Butter Braid pastries.

Challenges

Prior to their upgrade, workers were far more involved in the production process from hand batching and scaling every pastry to cutting open each bag of flour to pour into the mixer. Operators also collected and reported basic production data manually, leaving room for human error and inconsistency. This fully manual process was also time and labor intensive.

By adding automation to this process, Country Maid wanted to gain advanced data-collection capabilities to ensure each batch would retain the same high-level quality as the last. They also wanted to improve overall operational efficiencies throughout the facility.

Country Maid had to add an additional line to help meet demand. They had two options when it came to designing the mix room. They could either replace their mixer with a larger one, which would require expanding their facility to accommodate its size, or they could install a smaller new mixer with the new additional automated line.

We found that if we automated a new larger mixer, we could reduce the size of the mixer and avoid having to expand the facility. This option was less expensive and would achieve the same goal, said Marc Banwart, systems integration specialist, Country Maid. We knew the change would help us meet growing production requirements and give us access to data that would allow us to make better operating decisions.

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Country Maid Gains Production Intelligence to Meet Growing Demand for Hand-Braided Pastries