Page 31 - Food&Drink Business magazine June 2022

BAKERY BUSINESS
“ Our Huntingwood factory has five lines, and over the course of 12 months we will make more than 54 million kilos of biscuits at the site...99 per cent of our biscuits are made in Australia.”
wide range of products, probably the most famous being the Monte Carlo.
QHow does a line work? We have ingredients coming in one end of the factory and it is a continuous process from there, starting with mixing, resting, forming, and then baking.
From there, some biscuits go through a second process where we might add a cream, like in a Tim Tam, or a sprinkle, like we do for Shapes.
Then the line moves into the packaging section and the finished product is a case of biscuits, which then goes to our distribution warehouse. (See
Food & Drink Business’ May edition for our story on Huntingwood’s recently expanded distribution centre.)
The dough is fed through a series of rollers until it is the right thickness for baking and then cut into the all too familiar shape of a Tim Tam.
The line carries the biscuits into the 90-metre-long oven, where it only takes five minutes from beginning to end.
Then it goes through the processes of adding the cream, being sandwiched, covered in chocolate, and then cooled. Tim Tams have 20 minutes of cooling before they are packaged using a robotic system.
Q
We do have someone who gets to taste and score the biscuits, to make sure the batch is up to our standard. But to be honest, we’re all quality control officers.
Q
How long does it take to
make a Tim Tam?
The whole process takes roughly two hours.
There are 15 ingredients in a Tim Tam; 10 are automatically added by the bulk system while the remaining five are weighed up and added when the system tells the operator the dough is ready for them.
The mixer holds 934 kilos of dough and takes 45 minutes to blend all the ingredients together before it is left to rest for a well-earned 30 minutes.
Can I be Arnott’s quality
control person?
We all sneak a couple of
biscuits every day, just to make
sure they’re the right quality. ✷ also made at Huntingwood.
FROM FAR LEFT: The packing room of Arnott’s Huntingwood bakery | Inspecting Tim Tams as they head into the oven | Editor Kim Berry not containing her excitement | Tim Tam Deluxe is the latest range for the Tim Tam family | Shapes are
www.foodanddrinkbusiness.com.au | June 2022 | Food&Drink business | 31