needed to create it, then he or she will examine the customer’s existing production line equipment or specify a new setup that will get the most out of the ingredients. Whatever the challenge is, production costs and retail saleability are constant priorities. “You always need to keep your eye firmly on the financial side,” says Claus. “You can’t afford to work with a recipe that makes your process 10 to 15 percent more expensive or shortens shelf-life.” Taking matters (literally) into her own hands, she baked the product artisan-style at a local handcraft bakery and showed it to the customer. The idea was warmly received. Now the challenge was to prove that it could be produced industrially while retaining most of its quality. “The customer had a biscuit factory but nothing for soft cakes,” Claus remembers. “And none of the skills or machinery to get started. What they did have, however, was an open field, ready for a cake factory to be built.” Three months after the first on-site visit, the biscuit manufacturer sent a group of technical staff to one of Palsgaard’s five global application centers, and a week of work began to develop the basic recipe. A year later, Claus was back on site, helping to start up and fine-tune a brand new production line. Shortly after, the cakes were in the market as the company’s first baked product, becoming an instant success. “As an artisanal product, the cake had a shelf-life of two to three days,” says Claus. “But here we needed to achieve 6 months – partly to ensure export markets could be served. To achieve this, alongside other required qualities, we used the special capabilities of our own emulsifiers. At the end of the day, we managed to achieve the right shelf-life, and the result was a soft, tight structure with an attractive appearance.” Normally, a two-string production line would be required to produce this type of baked goods. Palsgaard, however, suggested a single line – saving a aeration line, which is one of the more expensive parts of a production setup. A single string solution also simplifies production, removing the need to carefully control and synchronize two lines – something that can cause variations, for example, in cake quality. While such a system had never been commercially implemented before, the team had successfully tested the concept at Palsgaard’s own industrial-scale pilot plant in Denmark. ASIAN CUPCAKES BOOST SALES Asked to come up with a text-book example from his many years in the field, Claus recalls the story of an Asian-style cupcake that went from nowhere at all to become a runaway market success. In fact, that story started when another of Palsgaard’s application specialists was asked if she could come up with something new for an industrial bakery in Asia. She was aware of a particular type of cupcake that was selling well in another part of the world, and thought it could be just the thing for the customer’s own market. WHAT IT TAKES “Challenges need to be solved with new approaches,” says Claus. “I generally can’t make a difference unless people let me make some changes to the recipes and, most 2
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