Industrial biscuit-making: reducing breakage and controlling spread

Breakage and excessive spread often share the same origin: a dough poorly balanced between structure and fluidity. Too much fluidity and the product spreads, loses its shape and baking becomes irregular; too much structure and the biscuit turns brittle, sensitive to the shocks of conveying and packaging.

First lever: the flour. A flour too strong for biscuits (high W, unbalanced P/L) creates shrinkage and tension. We aim for a weak, balanced flour, or we correct it. Second lever: the complete mix. A well-formulated cake or brownie mix brings a regular structuring system (starches, emulsifiers, double-acting baking powder) that stabilises spread from one batch to another. Third lever: corn starch, used as a texture and tenderness agent, reduces firmness and breakage without weighing the product down.

On the process side, we watch the dough temperature (a dough that is too hot spreads), the resting time, the gram weight and the baking profile. An oven that takes too late leaves the biscuit spreading before it sets.

The FinaAfric approach: we start from your products, identify whether the problem comes from the flour, the mix or the line setting, then test an adjusted formulation on your pilot line or under real conditions, measuring breakage before and after.