The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) may possess the secret to baking perfect buns every time. Its researchers have developed a production-line system that automatically inspects the quality of sandwich buns exiting the oven and adjusts oven temperatures if it detects unacceptable buns.

"We have closed the loop between the quality inspection of buns and the oven controls to meet the specifications required by food service and fast-food customers," says GTRI senior research engineer Douglas Britton. "By creating a more accurate, uniform, and faster assessment process, we are able to minimize waste and lost product."

During existing inspection processes, workers remove a sample of buns each hour to inspect their color. Based on this assessment, they manually adjust the oven temperature if the buns appear too light or too dark. But with more than 1,000 buns leaving a bakery production line every minute, there is a great need for automated control to make more rapid corrections to produce buns of consistent color, size, shape, and seed coverage.

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