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Old Posted Mar 18, 2010, 1:03 AM
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New plant gives London just desserts

Money Business Monday


COVER STORY: The Original Cakerie manufactures a host of decadent delights, including premium cakes.

By Hank Daniszewski, The London Free Press

Last Updated: March 15, 2010 7:12am

This new London manufacturing plant is all about cake, cream, strawberries, chocolate and other decadent delights.

Kim Wolf, general manager of the plant, confessed to succumbing to the "Freshman 15," the number of pounds new employees gain after sampling the products.

"I tried to put it under the umbrella of 'quality control,' but really, I just like the products," she said with a laugh.

Landing the $50-million plant in 2008 was a coup for London since the city faced stiff competition from other municipalities across the continent.

The Original Cakerie is a private company founded in Vancouver in 1979. It started as a small industrial bakery, producing high-quality food service desserts for restaurants in Victoria, B.C.

The London plant was its first major expansion outside of the home base and was designed to serve markets in eastern Canada and the United States.

Wolf said The Original Cakerie brand might not be familiar to local consumers, but they have almost certainly tried their products at some time.

The company makes a variety of premium cakes, dessert bars, and brownies that are sold through restaurants and food service suppliers such as Sysco.

It also supplies premium in-house brands for retailers such as M&M Meats and Sobeys in Canada and Kroger in the U.S.

The London plant, a big white building near Hamilton Rd. and Veterans Memorial Parkway, went into production last October.

The plant now has 70 employees and is operating one production line on one shift, but there's plenty of room to add more production lines and shifts in the 125,000 sq. ft. plant.

There is also lots of adjacent land on the site to double the size the plant.

The company's main plant in Delta, B.C., is about the same size as the London plant, but employs about 400.

Wolf said the timing for expansion of production in London will depend on market conditions.

The London plant makes strawberry shortcake, orange cream and lemon cream, black forest cake, chocolate layer cake and tiramisu.

The company is working on sourcing as many ingredients as possible from local suppliers.

Wolf says the production staff, who make about $14 an hour, are engaged in the process and co-operate in meeting production targets that are posted daily.

"We put one or two cakes in the lunchroom every day. We want people to know what they are making and be able to taste it and feel pride," Wolf said.

The workforce is diverse in both age and gender. Some have experience in food processing while others have come in from industries such as the auto sector.

Like most modern food-processing operations, the Cakerie plant is remarkably clean.

It starts at the door when staff members remove their outdoor shoes and replace them with indoor shoes. Those in turn are replaced with production shoes that are automatically scrubbed as workers cross a walkway onto the production floor.

Wolf said the cake-making process at the plant is basically the same as that seen in any kitchen, but on a grander scale.

The spinning mixer that makes the cake batter works much like the one in your kitchen drawer, but it's almost a metre tall.

The batter is poured in precise amounts into single-use baking sheets that are loaded on trays and rolled into walk-in ovens.

The baked cakes are put through a cooling tunnel, then go into a production line.

The plant can turn out about 3,000 to 3,500 "super-size" cakes, each weighing about 5 kg, a day.

The plant uses 100% dairy cream, pure fruit fillings, European chocolate and no preservatives.

Cakes are assembled into layers, if needed, and the whipped cream, fruit puree and other ingredients are added by hand.

As a worker spread the top layer of cream on a shortcake until it was perfectly smooth, Wolf said the handwork makes Original Cakerie look and taste like a premium product.

"This is what really distinguishes us," she said. "The tops are perfect, like ice on a skating pond."

Finished cakes are then sent to a highly-automated freezing system. Racks of cake are initially put into a blast freezer, then moved to tempering chambers where their temperature is gradually raised.

"There are hundreds of photo-eyes in here, keeping track of which rack is where and how long it has been there."

The frozen cakes are inspected boxed, shrink-wrapped and placed into a giant freezer room.

The plant's location next to Veterans Memorial Parkway offers easy access to Hwy. 401 and customers across Eastern Canada and the U.S.

Wolf, a Pennsylvania native who holds a mechanical engineering degree from Pennsylvania State University, previously worked for Eveready Battery and later joined Campbell Soup.

Wolf worked in the soupmaker's Pepperidge Farms division in the U.S., then came to Canada to manage Campbell's plant in Listowel.

She joined The Original Cakerie last year after Campbell closed the Listowel plant in 2008.

Wolf said The Original Cakerie targets a growing number of consumers who have a passion for good food and want to enjoy a premium, restaurant-quality product at home.

"It's a premium product with a value price," she said.

Like many food producers and retailers, Wolf said The Original Cakerie hasn't seen much impact from last year's recession.

"When times are tough, you can find comfort in good food like a great piece of cake."
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