This is the next in our series of Supply Side Innovators featured in our Bake Twentyfive issue. Each weekday, we will spotlight a new Supply Side Innovator that can help you create the flavors, textures, and designs your customers will love.

John McIsaac, vice president of strategic business development for Reiser, points out that Reiser offers a wide range of valuable tools to assist retail bakeries to address both challenges and opportunities through innovation. “Versatility and scaling accuracy,” he says, citing two key issues. “People come to us when portioning accuracy is important. They also come to us to maintain the high quality of their products. With our Reiser-engineered attachments they can use the same Vemag machine for multiple products. Few smaller producers can afford to have a single-purpose machine – and why should they?”

Of note, Reiser has 10 bakery specialists on staff. They are qualified bakers with many years of expertise, and they come from all facets of the industry: technicians, instructors, wholesale bakers, retail bakers and bakery scientists. “These experts have a deep knowledge of technology backed with decades of application expertise and are available to help bakers improve their operation,” McIsaac says. “Our Jeff Zeak, formerly of the American Institute of Baking (AIB), heads up our development efforts. He spends his days, and often his nights, figuring out how to improve our customers’ operations and how to solve our customers’ problems. Our bakers live around the country so they can quickly come to the facility and work to help our customers and potential customers.”

The Reiser Customer Center is second to none, he says. The 13,200-square-foot Customer Center is utilized by bakers to realize their immediate needs with their product in question and also to explore line extensions and innovative R&D ideas that are in their pipeline. “We provide all of the equipment of an industrial bakery so that bakers can conduct their tests without the constraints that often arise in their own production environment,” McIsaac explains.

On emerging consumer trends, McIsaac says Reiser is seeing an uptick in the company’s energy bar and protein bar equipment sales. “Producers often come to us to portion their most viscous products accurately,” he says. “Our Vemag equipment is known for handling dense products with inclusions. Now we are seeing many producers coming to our customer center to use our Seydelmann processing equipment to reduce and mix their ingredients.” In addition, he says, “we are seeing sales climb for our small Vemag 500 machines with multiple attachments. Our smaller customers like the versatility to run a wide range of products on a single machine.”

Fast facts

Opened in 2008 in Canton, Massachusetts, the Reiser Customer Center was updated in 2017 with new construction that doubled the size of the facility to 13,200 square feet. Problem solving is really the crux of the baking aspect of the Reiser Customer Center. Clients are seeking to scale up and increase efficiencies; formulate a new product; produce a gold standard prototype on their equipment; and/or rectify production issues.