Baking tins for bread in Kenya

Introducing commercial bread baking tins in Kenya

Why are bread tins made of aluminum?

1. Cheaper as compared to stainless steel. In my experience in the baking industry especially for large bakeries they might need thousands of baking tins. This is because having enough tins in your bakery allows you to produce bread seamlessly without stopping the mixing, proofing, and baking processes due to lack of enough tins. This allows your bakery to reach maximum production capacity and cut down cost of energy significantly.

If these bakeries used stainless steel tins, the cost would be too high and would total to millions of shillings. This cost is in addition to high commercial baking oven prices.

2. Safe for baking since aluminum is food friendly.

3. Durable and can withstand high pressure in the bakery.

What are the standard baking tin sizes in Kenya?

Interestingly over the past 3 years, I have experienced bread tin sizes increasing yet the weight remains 400 grams for the standard loaf! Reason? It’s simply because bakeries in Kenya are trying to win more customers. A longer loaf will have more slices and therefore easy to sell even if the weight remains 400 grams.

Let’s examine these changes in bread tins in Kenya below:

Before we start it’s important to note that tin size is equal to the bread size produced by that tin. Before 2018, the average bread baking tin sizes in Kenya were 20cm long,10cm wide, and 10cm deep. This tin gives a loaf that is 20cm long which will give about 16 slices of 12.5mm slice thickness which is standard in the Kenyan market.

Then came 2019 and a loaf length called “selecta” hit the market. It was 25/26cm long,10cm wide and 10cm high and produced 20 slices! And every bakery started to jump ship.

Let’s examine some benefits and disadvantages of the longer bread tins in Kenya:

1.The main benefit is winning the market is very easy since most customers like schools, families, workers would prefer more slices though the weight is still 400 grams.

2.The main disadvantage is that because of bread baking tin size it reduces the capacity of loaves produced from the oven. Also because of longer loaves they cannot fit 15pcs per crate, unlike the shorter 400 grams loaves.

See below a sketch of this infographic