Best Cookie Machines for High-Demand Summer Production

When you think about peak cookie season, you most likely think about the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas. But one of the other busiest times for cookies is summertime. — If you’ve run a bakery through the summer season, you already know how popular demand can be. Catering orders for graduations and weddings, platters for summer parties and events, street fairs: demand can double almost overnight, right when your kitchen is hottest and your labor is stretched thinnest.

Bakeries that are able to survive the rush aren’t hand-scooping their way through the summer months. They’re running commercial cookie machines that turn out consistent, portion-perfect cookies by the tray. They are producing trays and trays of consistent cookies each minute with ease! Looking to get your own machine to help you through the busy summer months, and eventually through the holidays? Here’s how to choose the right cookie depositor for your bakery, and which Empire machines fit each stage of growth.

Why Summer Breaks Manual Cookie Production

There are some veteran bakers who are impressively quick with their cookie production skills. Hand-scooping cookies is fine at 10 dozen a day. At 50 dozen, three problems show up fast:

Labor cost and availability. Summer is the hardest season to staff, and manual cookie production during busy months requires increased staffing. A cookie dropping machine reclaims that labor for decorating, customer service, and allows bakeries to keep up with demand without increasing labor.

Inconsistency. No matter how good you may be at hand-piping cookies, consistency will never be identical. Uneven cookies bake unevenly, portion unevenly, and cost you product. A depositor holds weight and diameter batch after batch with pinpoint precision.

What to Look For in a Commercial Cookie Machine

Before comparing models, get clear on three things:

Production volume. How many trays per hour do you actually need at peak to keep up with production demands? Keep track of your busy days and how many cookies you sold or how fast you sold out.

Product variety. Chances are, your bakery doesn’t just make one type of cookie. Cookie machines allow a bakery to automate the production of a variety of cookie types and styles, from stationary drop and rotary drop to wire-cut styles. Manually producing this many cookie types at volume is just too time-consuming.

Footprint. Floor space is money. Cookie machines feature compact designs but also come in tabletop versions that deliver serious output as well.

Recipe memory matters more than most buyers expect. Empire cookies depositors feature touchscreen controls and a 200-recipe memory capacity that allows any team member — including summer seasonal hires — to pull up the exact settings for every product and get identical results.

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