Frozen baked foods have been rapidly popularized and developed in recent years due to their good taste, high production efficiency, cost savings, easy coordination of production, sales and storage, safe and stable quality, and ease of variety diversification.
(1) Quality Advantages of Frozen Baked Foods
The emergence of frozen baked foods combines the advantages of pre-packaged products and freshly baked products and makes up for their shortcomings.
On the one hand, frozen bakery products have some of the advantages of pre-packaged products. Large-scale and standardized production is carried out through the central processing factory, which has better food safety guarantees, stronger quality control capabilities, higher production efficiency, higher product stability, and lower food safety risk. At the same time, frozen baked foods have a longer shelf life, but unlike pre-packaged foods, frozen baked foods ensure product quality through frozen storage, without adding preservatives, and are healthier and safer than pre-packaged products.
On the other hand, with the continuous improvement of frozen baked foods technology, after frozen baked foods are thawed and processed by on-site baking and heating, the freshness and taste of the products are basically the same as the freshly baked products of bakery stores, even exceeding some bakery stores level.
(2) Business Model of Frozen Baked Foods
Frozen bakery products solve the series of problems of bakery shops operating in the traditional model of the front shop and back processing site.
l Frozen baked foods can save the investment and operating costs of the bakery. The post-processing of some products can be completed only by a household oven, and no high-level bakers are required. The asset-light model can effectively reduce the operating risks of the bakery.
l Frozen bakery products can ensure bakery stores with an accurate and flexible relationship between production, inventory, and sales, and avoid waste caused by overproduction.
l The lack of baking professionals restricts the development of freshly baked products, and the lack and unevenness of technology affects the taste and appearance of the products; the standardized and large-scale central processing factory production methods of frozen baked food enterprises have solved the above problems.
l The central processing factory production model of frozen bakery products has stronger food safety guarantees than the hand-crafted workshops of traditional bakery stores and can effectively reduce the appearance of food safety problems.
l The use of frozen bakery products can enrich the product categories of bakery stores, realize rapid product iteration, and better meet the diverse needs of consumers.
(3) Frozen Baked Foods Enriches the Sales Channels of Baked Foods
In the past, non-professional bakery sales channels such as supermarkets, catering, beverage stores, and convenience stores did not have professional production sites, production equipment, production capacity, and related production experience, freshly baked bakery products were mainly carried out by bakery stores sales, while supermarkets and convenience stores mainly sell pre-packaged products. The emergence of frozen baked foods and their outstanding advantages can help such non-professional units sell freshly baked products, enrich their product structure, improve the taste and quality of their baked foods, and enhance consumers' consumption experience and desire to buy. Therefore, the emergence of frozen baked foods has made the sales channel of freshly baked foods gradually developed from being dominated by bakery shops to bakery shops, supermarkets, restaurants, beverage stores, convenience stores, and e-commerce, which has promoted the baking industry, enriched sales channels. It can be said that frozen baked foods can not only increase their penetration rate in the existing sales channels of the baking industry but also create new demands for the baking industry and increase the overall market scale of the baking industry.
Compared with frozen pastries, frozen bread is added with yeast. If the process is improper, the product is prone to spoilage, sourness, and reduced size. Therefore, the technical difficulty is higher and the production process control requirements are stricter. At the same time, frozen bread has stricter requirements on cold chain storage and transportation, which requires companies to have stronger cold chain logistics control capabilities.
