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Continuous mixing for bread dough

Continuous mixing for bread dough

In industrial bread production, dough quality is the foundation of the final product. Loaf volume, crumb softness, and shelf life depend on balanced hydration, gluten development, and controlled fermentation. Traditional batch mixing can be time-consuming, inconsistent, and difficult to scale. Sobatech offers a fully continuous and automated solution: continuous dough mixing, optionally combined with continuous bulk fermentation. Together, these systems can ensure a stable developed dough every second of production, delivering consistent quality, precise process control, and greater efficiency.

Continuous industrial mixing for bread dough

What is continuous mixing in bread dough production?

Dough quality

In industrial bread production, dough quality depends on balanced gluten development and hydration to achieve volume, crumb softness, and shelf life. Continuous mixing applies consistent mechanical energy to every piece of dough, eliminating batch-to-batch differences. The result is a stable dough with predictable proofing behaviour and uniform handling, reducing downstream adjustments during dividing, moulding, fermentation, and baking.

Continuous flow

Continuous mixing delivers a steady stream of bread dough with constant temperature, density, and rheological properties. This allows seamless integration with continuous bulk fermentation systems and high-speed makeup lines, minimising intermediate resting steps and reducing inconsistencies during proofing. Real-time control enables fine-tuning of mixing intensity, water addition, and energy input to ensure optimal dough characteristics at all times.

Efficiency and scalability

Continuous mixing reduces downtime, eliminates batch changeovers, and optimises floor space. Automated ingredient feeding and inline quality monitoring lower labour requirements and minimise waste. In combination with Sobatech’s continuous bulk fermenter, the system supports high-volume bread production while maintaining tight control over dough temperature, hydration, and gluten development, ensuring consistency at industrial scale.

From batch to continuous mixing

Process advantages

Conventional bread dough mixing in batch systems requires weighing, loading, mixing, discharging, and repeating the cycle. This stop–start method is time-consuming and introduces variations in dough hydration, temperature, and gluten development. Such fluctuations affect proofing behaviour, loaf volume, and crumb texture, often leading to inconsistent bread quality.

Sobatech’s continuous mixing technology replaces this with a continuous process. Ingredients are fed and mixed under tightly controlled conditions, ensuring precise hydration, stable dough temperature, and optimal gluten development. Combined with an optional continuous bulk fermenter, this system delivers a consistent dough mass with predictable handling and proofing behaviour, reducing downstream process adjustments.

Key advantages over traditional mixing include:

Consistent dough development for uniform loaf volume, crumb structure, and softness.
Stable fermentation behaviour due to controlled dough temperature and density.
High throughput and efficiency with continuous production and minimal downtime.

Technical highlights

Sobatech designs its bread dough systems to deliver consistency, scalability, and efficiency for industrial bakeries. Every component is engineered to optimise dough mixing and fermentation, ensuring high-quality bread production with minimal downtime.

Key technical features include:

Maintaining consistent dough temperature, quality, and dough characteristics at all times
Ensures uniform texture and gluten structure development
High accuracy dosing of solid and liquid ingredients
Automatic Cleaning in Place (CIP)
Constant control of kneading energy and dough temperature
Small footrpint, simple system set-up
Automatic rework/scrap feeding system for recycling dough offcuts back into the mixer, eliminating dough waste.

Continuous bulk fermentation

In bread production, fermentation is an important step. It defines dough volume, gas retention, crumb structure, and flavour development. During this stage, yeast activity produces carbon dioxide and organic acids, creating the aromas and extensibility that characterise quality bread. This phase is managed by the Continuous Bulk Fermenter: a fully continuous system positioned directly after the mixer. Inside the fermenter, dough rests under controlled time and temperature conditions before being fed into the make-up line for dividing, moulding, and proofing.

By combining continuous mixing with continuous bulk fermentation, Sobatech enables industrial bakeries to operate a continuous bread dough process ensuring consistent product quality with full process control from mixing to fermentation.

Explore continuous fermenting

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