Simply black and white
The separate temperature-controlled dessert and pastry department is actually a collection of independent work stations mass-producing hand-decorated cakes, cupcakes, eclairs and myriad other pastries and sweet goods.
In one corner, Beigel’s signature Black and White cookies require a multi-step process to avoid smearing. After baking and cooling, the first half of the delicate shortbread cookie is hand-dipped in white vanilla icing, which is allowed to set before applying the black or chocolate icing to the other half.
On the back end of the department, operators manually load sliced chocolate babka into a Bosch Doboy flowwrapper to individually wrap products — often at speeds up to 100 per minute — before manually applying adhesive labels.
Outside the distribution area, the bakery had to dig a slope in the parking lot to accommodate a wide variety of vehicles. The warehouse has two loading docks for semis, four for bakery route trucks and a small area for pickup vans that serve customers along the always-crowded New York streets.
Looking toward the future, Beigel’s has plenty of room to grow — 25,000 sq ft to be exact. Even at its current size, Mr. Gordon noted, the company made sure to set aside an area on the main production floor where it can install another production line when needed. The bakery also allotted space to add liquid tanks or other bulk handling systems as the business expands.
That potential volume for expansion provides the platform for sustained growth. “When we go to our larger customers, we can now show them that we have the capacity to serve them,” Mr. Folger pointed out. “We can tell them, ‘Whatever you need, we have the ability to get it to you.’ ”
In today’s ever-changing society, so little remains black and white, but at Beigel’s, it’s good to know that some things simply remain the same.
