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shop management and related mathematics. These schools have completely equipped bakeries where the student learns all phases of wholesale and retail baking. Courses cover routine shop work on all bakery products and special study leading to a thorough understanding of the chemistry of baking.

When the course of training in a good vocational school is completed, the students are prepared to take advantage of the opportunities for employment as foreman or production managers in large bakeries.

I would like to start out today with a little film clip looking back. Pursuing our theme, “Harvest the Past to Fortify the Future,” we have a 1946 film clip that shows a little bit about what baking was like back in the past. (FILM CLIP)

(Slide 2) Formerly, most bread was made in the home, but it took experience and a lot of hard work to turn out good bread every time. The housewife usually gave a sigh of relief when her efforts were successful. Today, the baking industry has taken over a good part of the job of providing America’s daily bread and other bakery products. The industry produces over $2 billion worth of baked foods per year. It employs more than 300,000 persons in a wide variety of jobs calling for various degrees of skill and knowledge. In a wholesale bakery, the actual baking is mainly machine operation, and except for certain key jobs, much of the work can be done by persons without any previous training. Bakers usually learn their trade as helpers or by contracting as apprentices. Experienced bakers teach the apprentice the skills of the trade, and when the training period is completed, the apprentice is qualified for a job as a journeyman baker. Baking can also be learned in a vocational school. Nationally known schools of baking are located at the Dunwoody Institute, the Siebel Institute of Technology and at the American Institute of Baking. Such schools offer ambitious workers a chance to qualify for better jobs in the industry. Their programs include instruction in the science and theory of baking,

and DevelopEducate

New Talent

By Richard Junge

Richard Junge has baking in his genes. Growing up in a family wholesale baking business gave him the opportunity to learn baking from a young age. Mr. Junge has continued to serve the baking industry in various roles including research and development and operations managements with grocery brands and food service companies. He is currently the bakery group manager for McDonald’s Corporation. Richard holds a masters of science degree in grain science and cereal chemistry from Kansas State University. He is a member of the American Association of Cereal Chemists, the Institute of Food Technology and the American Society of Baking.

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(Slide 7, 8, 9, 10) If we look at developing or educating talent, we have different universities that have different programs. We have Kansas State, obviously, one of our leading schools for baking, engineering, chemistry, nutrition and business management options. We have AIB with baking science programs in short courses, workshops and seminars. We have North Dakota State University and food science and engineering programs from all over the US — many different ways to develop talent. (Slide 11, 12)

As for paying for such education, we learned that schools have developed many programs. For example, David Krishock of Kansas State University has worked to put together a lot of these programs: “Brains for Grains” internships, scholarship and endowments, workshops, mentorships, collaboration with research projects and then “Everyone Recruit One.”

So, we learned this morning at the KSU/FSU Alumni Breakfast that K-State has really built and added to its program. The school is at an all-time high for baking enrollment. We still have challenges. (Slide 13, 14, 15, 16) Within AIB, we see some decline. We want to build that back up. Within the scholarship programs, we see some of that declining. We see some trade-off. We see some international students coming in and offsetting the enrollment trend for US students. These are all challenges that we face.

So as we look at developing talent and we come in to industry, we look at all the different areas. (Slide 17) These are the moving pieces that John Foley was talking about this morning, what it takes to be a bakery executive in today’s world. We have many different parts of that.

(Slide 18) I would like to talk a little bit about the complexity of baking. Baking is a really, if not the most, complex part of the food science or the food industry in terms of what it takes to get new products to market. If you think about it, the number of products that can come from the baking discipline, it is really infinity. You can develop new products, bring new products to market that had really never been invented or brought to the industry.

(Slide 19) If you look at some of the influencing factors in terms of managing complexity and developing new products, one of the areas that we are faced with is really

Such men — and women — must be highly skilled technicians. There are also positions as executives for those who know baking thoroughly and who also have some business ability.

Know baking thoroughly, have sound business ability — that is really what we are faced with in today’s world in terms of harvesting the past to fortify the future.

Harvesting the past — we get into different areas. We are faced with developing and educating new talent as well as the complexity of baking.

(Slide 3, 4) How do we mentor and train so that we do not lose the past or lose past experience? How do we teach new technology? How do we teach others the disciplines and skill sets for the baking industry? Those are all challenges we are faced with.

If you look at benchmarking and you come into an organization — maybe you come from a different background or different backgrounds — what are some of the things that you really need to look at? We need to take a page from what John Foley said this morning: We need to listen, we need to learn. Some of the things that we’re going to learn and add to our skill sets are taste and sensory analysis. Among the most important areas are taste and texture, product experience training, standardized baking test, baking formulation and training, industrial baking processes, advanced baking formulation and processes.

(Slide 5) If we look at how we can network and harvest the past, we have many different ways we can look at where we are today. This morning, we learned that the Bakery Ambassadors Group is going to be reformed. We have the American Society of Baking, the American Bakers Association; we have BEMA, the Baking Industry Suppliers Association; we have the Institute of Food Technology, the Biscuit & Cracker Manufacturers’ Association, the American Association of Cereal Chemists, the Tortilla Industry Association, the American Dietetics Association. These are just some we can look to for benchmarking and networking. (Slide 6) Other organizations would include the Wheat Foods Council and the Whole Grains Council, the International Bakery & Deli Association, the Independent Bakers Association, the Grain Foods Foundation, the Food Marketing Institute, the Bread Bakers Guild of America. There are many different ways we can network and harvest the past.

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Educate & Develop New Talent

the speed to market. It is a fast-paced world. It demands timeliness. How can you remain competitive without the reality of timeliness of new products? Risk. Risk is an interesting subject. If you look at risk in combination with speed and timeliness and you look at the capital dollars based on knowledge, then when making strategic decisions with the pool of baking talent in your organization, with those types of expertise and knowledge, you must ask, what do you have? In our business, a penny risked could become $4 million, so it is really important to have good talent, to ask good questions and to really challenge how we manage the complexity of our business.

(Slide 20) When we do benchmarking with other industries, there are tools used by other industries that perhaps can help us in our center of excellence in what we do in new products. John Foley talked about the center point this morning. I want to explain a little bit about this complexity model. This model was taken from Raytheon, where its system engineers really look at how they are going to solve problems and how can they model out in one page some of the complex areas that they deal with in developing new products.

(Slide 21) In developing this model, the first thing you do is just simply make a grid. Each space within that grid is an interface. If you look at how we’ve built this model, we have actually put in the critical things. And when I say things I mean raw materials, process steps, packaging, transportation — these are some of the critical areas that we deal with in terms of new products. If we take that vertical side of the page and just simply flip it up towards the horizontal part of the page, you’ll see that we have the same order on the vertical side as we have going across the horizontal side. So what we have are the boxes that we call interfaces, and then we have the complexity of the ingredients, process, packaging and transport. So, what we have done here is created some interfaces by putting X’s where we feel are important. Now, what I mean by important is if we go from the left side of the page to the right side of the page, we are really faced with increasing complexity. So, as we add more X’s, we add more complexity. If we start at the top of the page and come down and count the number of X’s, we determine the complexity involved. (Slide 22) Take yeast, for example. You can see that we have four X’s in box for yeast, so we have interfaces and we can talk about the variables within yeast. There is instant dry yeast, there is compressed yeast, and we can

talk about levels. When we run a test in a bakery, we might run three different levels of yeast. So, to take this a little bit further, if we take the example of yeast, then we see going across the page from left to right where we put the X’s. And the various places we have got X’s are mixing, dividing, proofing and baking.

(Slide 23) In each one of those areas, we can experience complexity. Continuing with the example of yeast, in mixing, if we use instant dry yeast, we might have interactions with glutathione that has been released and could reduce the mix time. So on and so forth as we go down the page, we see what yeast can affect in those different steps.

As we develop our complexity model, as we go down from the top of the page to the bottom of the page with yeast, we see that we have a complexity number of 24. (Slide 24) What we did is, we took the four X’s, multiplied that times the two types of yeast and the three levels of yeast, and now we have a complexity index or complexity number of 24. As we look at all the other areas we identified, you can see that we end up with a total complexity index of 404. Now, we look at that, and that seems a little overwhelming, but if you are sitting in a team meeting and you talk about sharing, you talk about mentoring and you have this to work off of, and let us say you make subnotes off of each individual area —yeast for example — and you sit there with your colleagues looking at this snapshot, you have a good way to discuss what is important. You can prioritize off that list and decide what you are going to work on, what is important and at what timeframe do you want to get these items accomplished to get a product to market.

(Slide 25) The beauty of this model is that you can take complexity out. Well, how do you take complexity out? You can take it out with knowledge; you can take it out from years of past experience. So in this green area, we have removed these X’s because we have knowledge around where we put those X’s, so it reduces the complexity of our model. Again, it is the center point. As John said, as we come in and we focus, that is the center point of what we are focusing on. But we also are sitting around the table, we are sharing, we are looking at how we can help each other, and we’ve taken some of that complexity out. So knowledge around different factors and different ideas really reduces complexity.

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I want to transition from this model into a different type of thinking that goes on in industry today and how it is used in different situations. But when we get into this model, it is basically about factorial analysis and using a statistician. So if we look at simple enzymes and dough conditioners — and they are not really simple, they are complex — for example, DATEM (diacetyl tartaric acid esters of mono- and diglycerides), sodium stearoyl lactylate and ethoxylated mono- and diglycerides. And we look at the combination of enzymes we might use in a system or product that we are developing, and if we evaluate three or more dough conditioners at three usages levels, along with the seven enzymes at three usage levels and the total doughs needed — we call them treatments — to understand how we’re going to optimize our particular product, then just doing the math, you must run 59,000 treatments to learn the results of running run 10 different ingredient treatments at three levels.

(Slide 26) If we look at the timeframe, it becomes a long time. If you want to duplicate tests and you want to run them in triplicate, you are going to have a longer time, which can amount to eight to 16 years. This calculation is from experience and does not take into account understanding where some of the knowledge and different experiences can come in to help reduce what we need to learn.

We can take the model with the green square and reduce its complexity by what we have learned, but we must also look at the outside influences such as speed to market in terms of risk. The question is, what is a penny or a million dollars? But look at all the different areas we are dealing with every day. John called these moving pieces. Allergens, nutrition, Food and Drug Administration regulations, political influences, quality assurance, environmental conditions — and here we have a new one: sustainability. This results in a lot of complexity with a lot of moving parts, but our conference theme, “Harvest the Past to Fortify the Future,” will what helps us as an industry.

(Slide 27) I would like to take you through just a little bit about what we have talked about. If we stand back up, we have talked about developing talent, trends in education, the influencing factors, the complexity model and our center point. We’ve talked about having experience and how that helps us perform in ways that reduce the time we run complicated experiments

and when we have complexity and the moving parts involved.

So as we look at the past and to fortify the future, what are the outcomes? ASB will have new talent to step in the future. ASB will have a fortified future. But again, as John talked about this morning, it is discipline. It is bakery discipline. It is sharing, working together, trusting and helping one another. Thank you very much.

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