If you’re thinking about starting a frozen pizza business or planning on expanding your established business, you’ve come to the right place for a go-to guide on the necessary equipment. You may also wonder how to improve your frozen pizzas and what kind of frozen pizza ingredients are possible. As frozen food professionals, we’ll answer these questions to help you get started with your frozen pizza business.
How to Make Frozen Pizza Better
Let’s start with how to make frozen pizza better. There are a number of factors that can change the quality of your frozen pizzas beyond choosing tasty ingredients. They include automation, knowing which equipment you need, and knowing your market.
Automate, Automate, Automate!
Automation increases revenue for businesses of all kinds. For your frozen pizza business, why only produce tens of pizzas per hour per employee when you can make up to hundreds per minute with automated technology? Automation also increases the quality and consistency between products, allowing new customers to become familiar with your product. Consistent products are critical in establishing a brand and meeting customers’ expectations. Automation makes multiple facets of your frozen pizza business streamlined and helps how to make frozen pizza better. When you automate more of your process, you can meet your ROI faster. The initial investment can be slightly daunting, but more automation helps you to turn a profit sooner rather than later.
Become Familiar With Automated Equipment
Now that we’ve established how important it is to automate your pizza production process, next you need to become familiar with the different equipment types that are available. We’ll list some of the more critical equipment later on and briefly how each one works. Becoming familiar with the automated equipment available helps you learn the industry and guide you to think about what your production process will look like. Learning the lingo helps you to become an expert in the business.
Know Your Market
The last way to make frozen pizza better is to do market research. There’s a lot of competition out there, so how can you create a unique frozen pizza that will have customers raving? You can go for tried and true recipes, but because automation allows you to try new recipes without using too many resources, why not create something that’s interesting and different? Market research can lead you to discover flavors and toppings that are gaining popularity. You can then apply them to your pizza.
Since we’ve discussed some basics of how to make frozen pizza better, let’s move on to what frozen pizza ingredients you can use with automated pizza making equipment. You can automate nearly every aspect of the pizza production process, so you can choose which units are best for your business.
Frozen Pizza Ingredients and Pizza Making Equipment
Regardless of the technology that you chose, you want to be able to rely on it. A snag in automation can cause unnecessary delays and lost revenue. When you choose automation, you should look for machines that can provide reliable productivity, quality, reclaim, and easy maintenance. Below is a list of the common pizza making equipment that can facilitate your production process, along with the frozen pizza ingredients that they typically apply.
Cardboard Circle Placers
Cardboard circle placers are often the first part of the automated process. While not a frozen pizza ingredient per se, cardboard circles, squares, and rectangles protect the pizza during assembly, distribution, and shelf-life. Cardboard circle placers apply them to a conveyor before dough application.
Sauce Applicators
After the dough is added to the cardboard base, the pizza-to-be goes through a sauce applicator. Sauce applicators can be waterfall-style or targeted applicators. Waterfall sauce applicators apply sauce to the whole pizza and leftover sauce is reclaimed and recycled and applied on subsequent pies. Targeted applicators apply a specified amount of sauce to the pizza so no food waste is produced.
Cheese and IQF Vegetable Applicators
Cheese and IQF vegetables are next on assembly lines and require automated applicators. These are most commonly waterfall applicators with reclaim capabilities. Reclaiming and recycling ingredients saves money because less food is wasted.
Meat and Pepperoni Slicers
After the cheese is applied, the pizza can go through automated meat slicers that can apply pepperoni, Canadian Bacon, and sausage to the pies. Automated meat slicers allow you to design the pattern of meat slices and control how many slices are applied to the pizza. Cylindrical cheeses can also be applied using these slicers, as long as they meet the machine’s specifications.
Dry and Granular Ingredient Applicators
Finally, you may choose to have dry and granular ingredient applicators that can dispense spices, seeds, salt, grated cheeses, and similar ingredients. You can make your pizza unique with the types of dry and granular ingredients that your brand uses. Since dry and granular applicators can handle a range of ingredients, you can be creative with the ones you want to try. As long as the ingredients fit the specifications of the applicators, they can apply the ingredients you want.
Water Spray Conveyors
A final step in most pizza production processes is having the pizza go through water spray conveyors. These conveyors apply a light water spray to the pizza to prepare it for the freezing process. As the pizza products undergo freezing, the light spray of water helps it to freeze better and protects it from drying out upon reheating. This layer of water also helps protect it during distribution and its shelf-life.
From the first steps to take to determining what frozen pizza ingredients you can use, this article can serve as a helpful guide for your new frozen pizza business.
Start Your Frozen Pizza Business With Quantum
You can start your frozen pizza business with confidence with Quantum Technical Services. We’re the number one name in pizza preparation technology and we’re here to answer any question you might have along the way.