The Bread Factory is London's leading wholesale craft bakery and a Royal Warrant holder, supplying artisan bread and pastries to the capital's hotels, restaurants and food retailers. Best known as the bakery behind GAIL's, it operates a head office and production bakery in Hendon together with further bakery sites including St Albans.
Production runs around the clock, with bakers, packers and drivers moving through the buildings on overlapping shifts every day of the year.
The Challenge
A commercial bakery has to manage two things at once: food safety and people. Production areas, chillers, goods-in and despatch all need to be restricted to the right staff at the right times, while a night shift of several hundred people needs to move quickly through the building without queuing at doors. Keys and shared codes could not give the bakery an audit trail of who had entered a production zone, and the growth of the business across multiple sites made a site-by-site approach unworkable.
“We are a food business first, so anyone who can get into a production area has to be someone who should be there. We needed control at every door, but we also needed it to be invisible to a baker starting a shift at three in the morning.”
Heather Harmsworth, Senior Project Manager, The Bread Factory
The Solution
Synel designed and installed Synergy Access across the head office and production bakeries, with readers on external doors, production entrances and restricted internal areas. Access is managed centrally by security group and time zone, so a night baker's credential opens the doors they need for their shift and nothing else, and contractors and agency staff can be issued time-limited access without involving the IT team.
The same credential is used for Synergy Time & Attendance, so a single tap at the door records both entry and the start of a paid shift. Every event is logged, giving the bakery a tamper-evident record of movement through production areas that can be produced for a hygiene audit or a customer visit in minutes.
Support
Installation was carried out by Synel's own engineers around live production, with doors commissioned between shifts so that bakery output was never interrupted. The bakery continues to rely on Synel's UK support team for new sites and door changes as the estate grows.
Success
The Bread Factory now has a single, centrally managed access system across its bakery sites, a complete audit trail for every restricted area and one credential doing the work of two. Shift changes run without bottlenecks and the security team can see the whole estate from one screen.