Oven Installation: Complete!

We just completed phase 2 of our second Heuft Thermo-oil deck oven installation, which doubles our capacity to bake our long fermentation sourdough loaves. Our newest oven is the culmination of planning that began two years ago, a PO placed over a year ago, and a two-part installation in a 24/7 facility of 40 thousand pounds of equipment. The heaviest two months of work are behind us, and now we’re in production.

When we install equipment like this, it isn’t a simple plug-in and start baking. It takes weeks of test baking, with debugging and adjustments, to ensure the oven is ready for prime time. Ensuring the airflow and temperature is even around the oven is key to making sure it produces consistently great sourdough.

This incredible new piece of equipment was manufactured in Germany by Heuft GMBH, the best builder of artisan bread ovens, and it allows us to bake the highest quality sourdough at scale. We bake our signature torpedo breads (like San Francisco Sourdough) at our Certified Organic Kingston facility using this oven system. It is engineered to conserve heat energy, and use a single natural gas burner to bake thousands of loaves of bread each hour. Our solar array provides some of the energy for the pumps and motors that circulate heat around the ovens.

We would not have been able to do this work without longtime partners like Benson Steel, whose crane team allowed us to move oven parts weighing 23,000 lbs a piece safely and smoothly.

Big shout and thanks to all our partners that contributed to this project -- and most importantly to the Bread Alone team that navigated a big summer of work at the bakery.

It takes incredible equipment and an amazing team to make a lot of good, honest food, and we’re so excited about our expanded capacity with our newest oven.