Anthony & Sons Bakery’s facility in Denville, NJ, has 65,000 square feet of production space. Five lines — two artisan bread lines, two roll lines and one high-speed bread line — create Anthony & Sons’ fresh bread and frozen product for its retail and foodservice customers. The bakery operates two 10-hour shifts, nearly every day, with a few hours off from Saturday to Sunday for maintenance. Sanitation is conducted around the clock after every production run. Baldo Dattolo, president and chief executive officer, estimated the bakery is running at 65% capacity and has two 10-hour shifts available to handle incoming demand.  

Flour is delivered every day by truck throughout the day to a KB Systems silo system that houses two 70,000-lb bins. Other dry ingredients and packaging materials are stored at an offsite 25,000-square-foot warehouse. Flour and water are scaled and delivered to the four Peerless mixers automatically. 

While water and flour are automatically scaled and added to the mixers, the rest of the ingredients are measured and added manually. Each horizontal Peerless mixer creates dough for the various lines in 1,000-lb batches, which are left to ferment at ambient temperature in troughs throughout the production room. 

The latest addition to the Denville production is a new high-speed Rheon makeup line, the latest technology from the equipment supplier, that was installed in November 2023 to handle the extra capacity brought in by the Italian Classic products. The new line replaced a smaller Rheon line and can produce 2 tonnes of product per hour. 

“We were doing the Italian Classic products on the baby Rheon line that was having to run 22 hours a day, and now we can use that line and our Italian makeup line as backups for this larger line,” said Dattolo. “We invested in the Rheon line because we needed capacity and to modernize.”

After the doughs for the Italian Classic are fermented on the floor, the troughs are wheeled to an automatic trough hoist that adds the dough to the hopper of the extruder. The extruder creates a continuous dough sheet, which is then gently sheeted and moulded, depending on the product being made. During Baking & Snack’s visit, ciabatta heroes were being processed. After the ciabatta hero dough is sheeted to the appropriate thickness, it’s cut into three lanes of dough before a guillotine divides the lanes into individual pieces. After makeup, the heroes are baked in a 60-foot Mondial Forni Sistemi tunnel oven. 

All transfers and scoring are done by hand in the Denville facility to keep things as nimble as possible. It’s also important to Anthony & Sons that the company retains the hands-on feeling consumers expect from Italian artisan bread. For the demi-baguette, which is currently Anthony & Sons’ No. 1 product, this oven runs that one item for two 10-hour shifts a day.

The Avocado Bread Co. products are all created on the high-speed bread line with a triple-deck Mondial Forni Sistemi tunnel oven that was installed in 2022. This is the second such oven for the bakery. The new oven, slicing and packaging equipment for the avocado bread were ordered just before COVID, and due to the global logistics crisis, they were all held up in Italy. 

“We’re lucky we ordered it when we did because today it would take too long to get to us,” Dattolo said. 

The high-speed bread line currently dedicates 1.5 shifts to avocado bread, so Dattolo pointed out there’s still plenty of capacity. The line can produce 3,000 units per hour. After dough is mixed in the Peerless mixer, it is divided by a WP divider that feeds a Benier makeup line. 

Dough is rounded before traveling through an overhead proofer and then moulded. Then the avocado breads are proofed in the final proofer for 2 hours. 

The various rolls Anthony & Sons produces are all made on one of two roll lines: a six-pocket Adamatic roll line with a Gemini Bakery Equipment divider or an eight-pocket Winkler line. Both are fully automated. Rolls and hoagies are baked on a 105-foot-long Winkler tunnel oven. 

Once products are baked, whether it’s avocado bread, Italian Classic or artisan bread, they cool on one of four ambient spiral coolers: two IJ White coolers, one G&F Systems cooler and one Vinak cooler. Once bread is thoroughly cooled, it travels to one of four packaging lines for slicing and bagging. 

The Avocado Bread Co. sliced bread is sliced automatically and then the loaf is split in half to create the 24-oz half loaves before being bagged. It’s the way Anthony & Sons had traditionally done its sliced breads, such as the rye, so it was only natural to continue with the new loaf. The formerly manual process of splitting the loaf has since been automated with this new investment in custom equipment. The slicing and packaging line can do 2,800 units per hour. Anthony & Sons recently purchased a backup slicer in case the slicer goes down for maintenance. 

Burford closure machines seal the bread bags before they are loaded into cases that are erected and sealed by a Niverplast case erector. 

Frozen product is stored in a freezer on-site. It’s shipped out either LTL or the customer picks up the product from a distribution center. Fresh product is made on the overnight shift and delivered through Anthony & Sons’ direct-store-distribution network of 65 trucks. 

Despite a wide array of products, Anthony & Sons has organized its line management so that efficiency doesn’t suffer at the hands of flexibility. 

“Every line is dedicated to a set of products, so that allows us to be efficient,” Dattolo said. 

Each line also has a manager who supervises production schedules and orders. Frozen orders are put in by the customer two weeks in advance so line managers can schedule production accordingly. For niche products for long-term customers, benchwork bakers make products that are too labor-intensive or small to run on the automated equipment. These products are baked in the Revent rack ovens still housed in production. 

Anthony & Sons is a flurry of activity with production employees scoring bread and ensuring packaging is running smoothly. Despite these manual processes, Dattolo says the company doesn’t struggle to keep positions staffed. The average tenure of employees in the office and on the production floor is about 15 years, he estimated. While the company recently hired a new human resources director who is working to ensure people feel seen and appreciated, Baldo Dattolo chalked up their workforce success to a simple principle. 

“You just have to be kind, treat people with respect and remember to have a little fun,” he said. 

It is obvious to anyone who spends a bit of time at Anthony & Sons that the team is full of respect, kindness and a capacity for fun. Nick Sorresse, senior vice president, has been with the company for more than 20 years, and he says that’s because it simply hasn’t stopped being fun yet. 

When the leadership at Anthony & Sons looks to the future, they certainly have their business goals. The Avocado Bread Co. and Italian Classic lines in addition to their already solid foundation have the company hoping to hit $100 million in revenue in the next five years. Creating a brand new product has been an invigorating experience that everyone at Anthony & Sons is proud of, but at the end of the day, Dattolo pointed to something more. 

“I feel blessed that I’ve gotten to do something I really love with people I care about,” he said. 

This article is an excerpt from the May 2024 issue of Baking & Snack. To read the entire feature on Anthony & Sons Bakery, click here.