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Case Study 1: Lew-Mark Baking Company

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Case Study 1: Lew-Mark Baking Company

The Company
The Lew-Mark Baking Company is located in a small town in western New York State.The bakery is run by two brothers. Lew and Mark, who formed the company after theypurchased an Archway Cookie franchise. With exclusive rights in New York and New Jersey,it is the largest Archway franchise. The company employs fewer than 200 people, mainly bluecollar workers, and the atmosphere is informal.

The Product
The company’s only product is soft cookies, of which it makes over 50 varieties. Larger companies, such as Nabisco, Sunshine, and Keebler, have traditionally produced biscuit cookies, in which most of the water has been baked out, resulting in crisp cookies. Archway cookies have no …show more content…

Quality
The bakery prides itself on the quality of its cookies. A quality control inspector samples cookies randomly as they come off the line to assure that their taste and consistency are satisfactory, and that they have been baked to the proper degree. Also, workers on the line are responsible for removing defective cookies when they spot them. The company has also installed an X-ray machine on the line that can detect small bits of metal filings that may have gotten into cookies during the production process. The use of automatic equipment for transporting raw materials and mixing batter has made it easier to maintain a sterile process.

Scrap
The bakery is run very efficiently and has minimal amounts of scrap. For example, if a batch is mixed improperly, it is sold for dog food. Broken cookies are used in the oatmeal cookies. These practices reduce the cost of ingredients and save on waste disposal costs. The company also uses heat reclamation: The heat that escapes from the two ovens is captured and used to boil the water that supplies the heat to the building. Also, the use of automation in the mixing process has resulted in a reduction in waste compared with the manual methods used previously. New Products
Ideas for new products come from customers, employees, and observations of competitors’ products. New ideas are first examined to determine whether the cookies can be made with existing equipment. If so, a sample run is

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