Product spotlight:
Flaked shortening
One important product that will play a major
role at AAK’s newly opened Customer Innovation
Center in Louisville, Kentucky is flaked shortening,
a product that despite its many advantages still is
unfamiliar to many customers. AAK’s Anker Fog,
Business Development and Marketing Analyst, explains
the capabilities of this value-adding product.
Flaked shortening, with its intrinsic value-adding properties,
has proven itself time and time again to be an integral
product in AAK’s bakery portfolio. Although the technology
has been commercially available in the US and the UK for
several years, many customers are still unacquainted with
the product and the immediate advantages it provides. The
versatility of flaked shortening makes it a true value-adding
product as it can be used for two major purposes: functionality
and flavor delivery.
In terms of functionality, flaked shortening improves
dough processing and eating qualities in a finished baked
good. There are many facets to functionality, but we like to
think about it in terms of how it helps a customer to achieve
its goals. Flakes are easier to handle and incorporate into
the dough than traditional packaged shortening, but for
the customer this translates into labor cost, waste, and
processing time reductions. Flakes provide improved
aeration, flakiness, and tenderness in a baked good and
create an open cell structure, but what the customer gets is
an overall better product with enhanced consumer appeal.
When it comes to flavor delivery, flaked shortening has a
clear advantage over traditional shortening because it can
Made at our sites in Louisville, USA and Hull, UK, flakes
have been used in unique ways to solve the toughest
formulation challenges. Recently, a US customer was having
issues during scale-up to full production of a brand new
cake mix when using a competitor’s liquid shortening. The
product clumped and occasionally clogged the customer’s
high-speed packaging line. Although we were not the
primary supplier, AAK was invited to walk the plant to see
if we could help.
We recognized the issues the customer was facing
and determined that our flaked shortening could be easily
incorporated into the dry ingredient mix, especially when
combined with granulated salt or sugar. The higher melting
point of our speciality flakes also gave great heat tolerance
be evenly (and easily) dispersed throughout the dough.
This uniform distribution of fat creates pockets of flavor
that are consistent throughout a baked good. Our ability to
create custom flavors of flakes, such as natural butter and
cinnamon sugar, creates another value-adding layer as we
can eliminate an entire step in the customer’s manufacturing
process.
Typically, flakes have performed best in frozen and
refrigerated doughs as well as applications such as American
biscuits, pizza dough, and pie crusts. Flakes perform
especially well in these products because of how well they
maintain their structural integrity during processing and
handling and for the flakiness, tenderness, and air pockets
they provide in the finished baked good.
Customer Co-Development in the United States
Flaked shortening to the rescue
to withstand friction created by processing. Although the
customer had never worked with the product, our suggestion
to switch from liquid shortening to flaked shortening resulted
in a highly successful production trial and enabled the
customer to accelerate the development process and launch
their cake mix 8–12 months ahead of schedule.
For AAK, flaked shortening is the very definition of a valueadding
solution.
Sandy Courtney
Account Manager, AAK USA
Laura Muller
Customer Innovation Application Specialist, AAK USA
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