Swiss Pastry Factory

Today I'll show you how the pastry most Swiss eat daily is prepared. The brand new pastry-making facility of COOP just outside Lausanne kindly allowed me to spend a morning there with my camera. A captivating experience. In Switzerland we don't have Walmart, Tesco or Marks and Spencer. Our supermarket scene is led by two Swiss giants, Migros and COOP, both cooperatives with non profit goals. COOP has 45,000 employees in Switzerland and, on top of selling groceries, clothes and all the things one expects to find in a supermarket, they also offer traditional food specialties. I am a big fan of their Slow Food section which sells hard-to-find delicacies such as red cows' milk Parmigiano, white polenta flour from Ticino or San Marzano tomatoes. Every evening every one of the 1400-odd COOP shops in Switzerland sends in its orders for the next day electronically. How many rice boxes, how many bottles of Champagne, and how many Napoleons. A custom SAP system works out the quantities the Aclens facility, which serves Western Switzerland, must produce for the next day. Let's see what happens next.

You may point out that these are no match for your grandma's cakes, and I would agree, but we would both miss the point. The fine people in this industrial bakery strive, day in, day out, to bring the best quality fresh pastry the majority of people will be able to afford. Certainly, a thousand layer cake by Pierre Hermé is made from better material, but to spend 100 Euros for a birthday cake? Students and many families, even in Switzerland, live on a budget.

Do you like Japonais pies? Let's see how you can turn out 100 pies in under an hour.

The night crew has baked a number of sponge cakes and cut each in half horizontally.

The cake halves are placed on a conveyor belt to be assembled.
See a 360° Panorama (1.5 Mb full screen) or 2000-pixels equirectangular panorama (plain vanilla JPEG 150Kb ).

Each sponge cake half is placed on the automated cream wheel, the real soul of the pastry.

The lady turns the machine on with a food pedal and off it goes, rotating the cake while pouring the filling on top - always the exact same amount. The cakes are then placed back on the conveyor belt.

Next stop - spreading and weighing. This lady checks the weight to make sure there is no excess of filling (that would just be too filling) and spreads the cream with a large flat knife.

The pies follow the line to a man who dredges their sides in slivered almonds...

...until finally they are stacked up on a tray. Bits of almonds that fell off the pies are collected in a plastic box at the end of the belt. Clean and efficient like a Swiss clock.

If only you could lay down and rest your head on a pillow below the conveyor belt, you would never again have to worry about having enough calories to last the day.

Click on picture for another 2000-pixels equirectangular panorama (JPEG 250Kb)

In French Napoleons are called mille feuille, or 'thousand layer cake'. Not another example of French hubris but rather a precise mathematical observation. When properly made, the puff pastry used to make Napoleons is folded 10 times in half, yielding 1024 layers in one single thin sheet of puff pastry. As you can see, there are three such sheets per Napoleon, which makes for 3072 wheat-butter layers in one Napoleon. A real treat for geeks to impress their girlfriends with raw brainpower. See how you can turn out 7200 portions in under an hour.

This gentleman is filling the pastry cream into a huge funnel to fill the space between two sheets of puff pastry.

When I arrived, a batch of Napoleons had already been prepared in large 1 meter square trays iced and stacked up, ready for the guillotine.

Cutting a Napoleon down to size is no walk in the park, even with a one-man-portion. Everytime I try, the custard oozes out from all four sides and the Napoleon is empty by the time the blade touches the plate. How in the world can you manage to cut 7200 miniature Napoleon and not spill a drop of custard?

This gentleman carefully places a sheet of Napoleon in a huge and very expensive machine. The Napoleon is immediately painted with various ominous-looking red laser beams. His time is up.

The Napoleon slides into the machine and is immediately cut down by an automated ultrasonic blade. The $25,000 ultrasonic blade vibrates to prevent the cake from breaking. In a couple seconds it recognizes the size of the Napoleon, decides how many pieces to cut and cuts them. Bang, bang, bang, the cake is cut 24 times lengthwise. The blade moves up, waits a second, then turns at a 90 degrees angle and pounces back on the Napoleon like a bird of prey, cutting it crosswise three times.

Its job done, the machine spits the Napoleon in the back with its conveyor belt. The edges, too tiny to make proper portions, fall off in a huge plastic crate below, under the vigilant eyes of the operator.

The scrape Napoleon box fills pretty quick ...

... and our operator soons needs to move it. 'What do you do with it?', I ask. 'I guess we could bring this to a school and the kids would only be too happy to eat as much as they can,', he jokes, his face gleaming thinking of the scene, 'but in fact we sell it to a farmer as pig food', looking more serious now.
Click on the picture for a 2000-pixels panorama (JPEG, 250Kb).

On the other side, a packing detail waits for the Napoleon portions to exit the machine.

Napoleons are packed four to a box.

Here are the four I bought from a COOP shop the next day.

Each Napoleon sheet yields 72 rectangular portions. How many layers does that make? The operator reckons 100 sheets times 72 is 7200 Napoleons. Yes, but how many layers? Three times 72 millions, each portion having three layers of puff pastry of 1024 layers each. The master of Napoleons, for that makes 1024x100x72x3 = 221'184'400 layers.

Fruit Pie

Who would eat fruit pies were it not for the custard?

Our giant conveyor belt now carries fruit pies from the cradle to the gullet.

See the 360° Panorama (1.5 Mb fullscreen)! These guys were manning the fruit-covering detail.

This guy seemed to have great fun spraying liquid jelly on top of the cakes with his pistol. 'You're the man with the jelly gun', I told him. 'That's me', he replied.

This gentleman was dredging the sides of the fruit pies with almonds. As I was taking his picture, he asked me 'For what newspaper is it?' I explained it was for a website in English and he laughed 'So I won't be famous just yet then!'

How many times have I turned up at a birthday party as a kid and seen the dreaded Forêt Noire ('Black Forrest') Pie on the table? I try to forget. But, hey, kids take a few years before they can tell the good pies from the others. And there are some die-hard Black Forrest Pie addicts out there. Let's see how it's made.

A printed production sheet specifies the quantities to be made and when it starts and finishes. Things work like clocks in Switzerland. A friends Italian grandma used to say that 'At least during Mussolini's time, trains got on time'. Well here they always got on time.

This here young lady takes a pile of chocolate sponge cake her colleagues baked during the night shift a couple hours before.

Ah, my heart will always stop for a lady with a gun. She fires away, spraying the inside with kirsch. The pies are then filled with a white cream and alcohol-soaked cherries, then the sides are covered in chocolate flakes.

We called this lady the Black Forest Lady as she was so eager to make these pies. Always harboring a lovely smile, you could tell she just love the product. How many pies do you make a day, I asked. 'On Thursday, about 100 pies.' 'I suppose they are popular for birthdays', I replied. 'But you can eat them on regular days too' she protested with a self-conscious smile.

Here is the end product bought in a COOP store the next day. This is a very good example of the type of pastry most people eat in Switzerland. Sure, we also have fancy artisan pastry chefs, but their prices put their products out of reach for most people.

Eclairs

As soon as she was over with the pies, the Black Forest Lady started filling cofee éclairs.

Undoubtedly, she is the lady people turn to for the more delicate operations in this factory. One by one, she filled the pâte à choux shells with coffee or chocolate cream, a very filling filling. She then moved the trays in the back of the giant hall, near this corner on a large table

Minutes later, a man was busy icing each éclair one by one.

Completed products are boxed, labelled and laid one by one in gray plastic crates that are moved automatically on a labyrinthine automated tray system of Pentagonal proportions.
Click image to see a 2000-pixels-wide panorama (Jpeg, 150Kb).

Other pies with a longer lifespan are stored overnight in a drive-in fridge.

I saw many others things that day, none of which turned me off apart from gargantuan scale of things. A gentleman was preparing the filling for one local Lake Geneva specialty COOP only makes for this region - tart à la crême, a flat pie filled with caramelized cream. In a giant mixer, he mixes sugar, cream and starch closes a security grate around the giant head, then plays with the dials to set up speed and mixing time. This will certainly not beat your grandma's homebaked cream pie, but here they use only quality products and do this with care and pride. Nothing to be ashamed of and I'm sure that the pies that will come out of this caldron will make many people happy all around Lake Geneva on the next day.

In other parts of the factory, we saw this other lady soaking sponge cakes in rhum. Giant trays held other cakes. Then a copper pot of boiling caramel and a block of icing for the (seven hundred) thousand layers cakes.

A battery of tools fit to feed a battalion and neatly placed on racks.

The washroom where the equipment is scrupulously washed from dusk till dawn and dawn till dusk.

This pastry plant is not opened to the public although you can book tours of the logistics facility in which it is located. I received the warmest welcome at this factory and everybody I met smiled and seemed to be pleased to work there. The batches are relatively small so there is no repetitive task. You do a Japanese Pie for an hour, then move to a thousand-layer-cake, then go ice some choux, all this in a group of people. Nice working conditions and the cleanest factory East of Silicon Valley. To enter the facility you need to wear a white overall with a special hat. If you need to eat, smoke, drink or pee, you have to leave the facilty and come back through the airlock, the only way in. The airlock will open only after you have placed both hands in the holes of machine that sprays them with disinfectant, waits and then releases the door. We don't joke about hygiene here!