my name is mwd

Laura and I are always interested in stories of how things were made, and we were listening to Tim Minshell's book on that topic on a recent drive up north, Your Life Is Manufactured. The section we listened to that day was about how manufacturing scales, which he illustrated by talking about the trade-offs between things like flexibility and throughput as you go from home baking, to a small local bakery that does specialty cakes, to a small local bakery that does hundreds of buns, and then up to a commercial baker that ships to supermarkets across the country^[1].

This actually mirrors a lot of our youtube viewing habits: we are suckers for watching videos of factory tours, of any size. We're eager viewers of The Scandinavian Fika channel, where each episode the follow a day in the life of a different local bakery, from lights on at 3am until goods start going out the door as doors open several hours later:

There's no voice over, just occasional subtitles. We like it partly as we like to bake the occasional Swedish sweet thing, but also just because we find it fascinating to watch experts at work, particularly with something so hands on as a small bakery.

Scaling up slightly, it seems a trend in Swedish food youtubers to visit factories to see things being made. Matgeek (Swedish for "food geek") has done this for many years, and even if you can't speak Swedish, just seeing how the production lines work is still very interesting (my Swedish is only good enough to get the very slightest of idea what he's asking people about).

And it's interesting to learn about other parts of the supply chain. One of the bread factories he tours you see they take back the unsold bread and use that to make the yeast they use for future batches.

Similarly, Filip Poon, has been filling in the rest of the Swedish sweet tooth factories:

And as big as Delicato (makers of all that is good in the world, the Punschrulle) are, I suspect they don't operate at quite the same scale as Mr Kipling does. Tim alludes to them in his book, but doesn't go into much detail. Thankfully, you can have a 40 minute dive into the the Mr Kipling factory here:

What surprised me about this factory was how hands on it still was. Yes it is highly automated and it was lovely to watch machines make French Fancies with the waterfall of icing that feels straight out of Willy Wonka, or how the machines slice and arrange the sponge in Battenberg (between Punchrullar and Battenburg you can see I'll eat anything if you wrap it in marzipan), there was still quite a lot of manual weighing and measuring and testing, and they do internal training of staff for a maintenance of the production lines - it was good to see an example of both sides of the factory being highlighted in this one.