What’s in the recipe for the best hamburger buns in Southern California? Flour, water, yeast, love of baking, and Zebra’s MZ 320 Mobile Printer.
Imagine you’re in the business of producing specialty breads and that your chosen customer niche consists of more than 2000 regional restaurants, food stands and coffee shops. Day in, day out, you don’t know what you’ll be producing for delivery tomorrow morning until noon today, and then you must make those delivers within minutes of production, not hours. And, of course, your best laid plans succumb to the domino effect when one of your favorite customers calls to beg, “I order 2000 buns, but we’ve been crazy busy today. We really need 500 more. Help!”
That’s Southern California’s family-owned Puritan Bakery, famed throughout that region for the “Best Buns in Town.” Puritan, headquartered in Carson, California, was established in 1938. In 2010, the Orange County Register’s best-burger poll declared In-N-Out Burger, a perennial favorite, the best in Southern California. Puritan has been supplying its “best buns” to In-N-Out Burger since the 1950s, and is now so dominant in the SoCal burger scene that it was the subject of a 2011 Register feature article, entitled The secret behind SoCal’s best burgers.
What makes for a great hamburger bun? “In-N-Out’s four-inch buns are ‘tweaked’ for better grilling results.” “It doesn’t fall apart, and it doesn’t get soggy.” (Man! I’m getting hungry just writing about them!) Consider the peerless care and quality that goes into each and every bun and multiply that by an hourly production capacity of “up to 36,000 buns and 2800 loaves of bread” per hour, and you get a feel for the logistical challenges that face the 200+ members of the Puritan team.
As its business grew, Puritan’s need for real-time data on the movement of every bun and loaf, from receipt of raw materials to delivery of the final product, became paramount. The solution included handheld computers mated wirelessly to Zebra Technologies’ MZ 320 mobile printers allowing delivery drivers to also deliver that real-time data needed back at the office.
Drivers inventory deliveries as they are loaded their trucks and transmit that data before beginning their routes. The office knows immediately what drivers loaded what products for what customers, allowing office staff to begin reconciling orders before the first delivery is made. Puritan’s drivers make, on average, 40 deliveries per day. With MZ 320s on their belts, drivers print and deliver invoices without
wasting a step, and with the process being repeated 40 times a day, that’s a lot of saved steps and time – at least 30-minutes worth per driver per day.
Meanwhile, the office team is able to confirm and reconcile each delivery and invoice as soon as it’s made. Compare that to the previous era when beginning accounting for a day’s deliveries had to await the return of all delivery trucks.
The “Best Buns in Town” make for the best burgers in Southern California, and they’re all a little fresher today thanks to Zebra’s MZ 320 mobile printers.
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