Convenience Products- Useful and Practical
Convenience Products-Not in My Bakery
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Second Life foodies, who would of thought?
Chef B
- Chef Burnett
- Charlotte, North Carolina, United States
- Frances Ponsford Burnett, M. Ed. C.H.E., C.M.B., C.E.P.C. College of Culinary Arts-Senior Instructor Frances Burnett, Columbia '07 recieved a masters in Education, JWU ’90, holds a bachelor’s degree in Food Service Education and an associate degree in Baking & Pastry from. After graduating from JWU and working as a pastry chef for the Daily Bread in Providence, R.I., she worked as a consultant for the National Honey Board, Calif. Raisin Advisory Board and Flaxseed Council of Canada on behalf of Thomas Payne Market Development in San Francisco. Earlier in her career, Burnett worked for Marriott International in Los Angeles, San Diego, Bermuda and New York as a pastry chef/baker/task force trainer, traveling to new hotels to open bakeries. She also worked at Bristol Farms Market in California as bakery supervisor. She is one of a handful of women in the country to hold the prestigious title of Certified Master Baker and is also a Certified Executive Pastry Chef and Certified Hospitality Educator.
5 comments:
Personally I don’t like to use convenience products in my bakery. Why? I don’t know what kinds of ingredients were used in the products, and who made them. Even though it takes a long time, I want to serve my own products to my customers. Also, I am interested in protecting the reputation of my bakery. (www.osti.gov/energycitations/product.biblio.jsp?osti_id=5163087)
Personally I don’t like to use convenience products in my bakery. Why? I don’t know what kinds of ingredients were used in the products, and who made them. Even though it takes a long time, I want to serve my own products to my customers. Also, I am interested in protecting the reputation of my bakery. (www.osti.gov/energycitations/product.biblio.jsp?osti_id=5163087)
In my opinion we need pastry chefs. There are so many people who have a sweet tooth in this world. Even though a person can't made pastries, they do like to eat and enjoy them. Especially people in the US like to go out and have good at restaurants. After they finish their food, they like to have dessert. I believe the most important reason for the need of pastry chefs is to make specialty deserts for weddings, party's and special events. We need pastry chefs with a great amount of creativity so consumers can make choices and have their cake and eat it too.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/2004-05-09-exec-pastrychef_x.htm
As more bakeries stirve to provide the maximum amount of products in volume, convenience products have become more prevalent. Items like frozen pre-formed dough, bread, cake, and ice cream mixes, and ready whip icing have taken over the market. These foods do lower food cost, alabor cost, and also retail prices, but the important thing is how does this effect the product and eventually the consumer?
There are a few important questions to ask yourself when considering the use of one of these products; does it jeapordize the quality of the product? How does it effect the nutritional value, texture, flavor, etc.? and what chemicals and additives are present that give this product a nice long shelf life? Magazine's like Baking Buyer advertise frozen, pre-formed products that are "just like homemade!" If it is simply a matter of haveing a cakery and wanting to offer cookies in your front window then frozen might be the way to go, seeing that that is not your main focus and would be inconvenient. But can stores that carry only convenience products that they shove in the oven for 20 minutes even be considered a bakery?
However, a bakery offering completely made from scratch products may find it very difficult when it comes to finances. When making foods in house it takes alot more labor, food cost, and time. This requires these bakeries to but much more expensive than your average grocery store. How do you convince consumers to buy your more expensive product? Baker Fred Spompinato says that it's all about publicity. If you imform your customer's of things like how long it takes to make a sourdough baguette and maybe how long you've had your levain, the fresh fruit that is included in your product, or the nutritional value and wholesomeness of your particular product then they may not mind paying the extra money. Offer comparative samples so that the custmer can see and taste the difference in something baked this morning and something par baked and heated up and left on a shelf for a week.
Beach, Tarre. "How Artisan can You Afford to be?" March 2007. The Baking Buyer.
Urein, John."Featured Products" June 2007. The Baking Buyer.
I believe that convenience products are useful in the bakeshop. These products can give you the quality that you are used to making as well as consistency that you need when serving the public. Also, convenience products save you both time and money in the long run. Products such as liquid egg yolks and frozen whites allow you to save time and labor from cracking the hundred or so eggs you would need in one day. Already made puff pastry saves you hours of lamination that could be used to product other labor intensive products. I don’t believe that these products should be used for everything in your bakeshop and that some products come out best when made by hand; however, if everything in your bakeshop was produced by hand you could not make a good quantity of product, ultimately missing out on a good chunk of profit. However, I believe that if you do choose to use convenience products, you should not just pick the first thing on the list or the cheapest one on the list. You should research the product that you will be using to find out what they put into their products, the company itself, and customer reviews. I also believe that you should test several products to find which one is the most consistent and produces the best results. I would definitely use convenience products in my bakeshop.
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