Guttenplan’s frozen dough rises in popularity

As a child, Jack Guttenplan remembers his father falling asleep at the Thanksgiving table, exhausted from baking the bread that went on everyone else’s table. Operating a thriving retail bakery meant no holidays, no weekends and “no life” for Jack’s parents.

“They worked around the clock. Every night after dinner, they’d go and make rolls for the next day,” he recalls. “I didn’t want that.”
Yet when his father, Irving, decided to retire, Jack chose to leave his job as an accountant and join the business that his grandfather, Jacob, had started in 1908. “My father said, ‘I’m done. Come in now or I’m going to sell it.’ So I came in.”

The early years were difficult, as Jack worked around the clock at the bakery while wife Patsy “took care of everything else.” But, it wasn’t long before Guttenplan’s Bakery moved away from its retail focus and developed a frozen dough business in response to a growing demand from supermarkets. In the 1960s, the company had perfected a procedure for freezing unbaked dough for distribution to its own retail outlet shops. The supermarkets, which wanted to offer their own freshly baked product, started to request Guttenplan’s unbaked dough as well. Frozen dough sales eventually became the focus of the business, as it supplied frozen bread and roll dough to supermarkets throughout New Jersey.

In 1990, Guttenplan’s developed a 12-acre site in Middletown, N.J., exclusively for frozen dough production and closed all of its other bakery operations. With that, Jack reclaimed his evenings, weekends and holidays for good.

Now known as Guttenplan’s Frozen Dough, the company produces about 2 million pounds of frozen dough each week. It distributes 300 different products, including 26 different flavors of bagels, 66 kinds of rolls, 51 different breads, eight styles of baguette, plus assorted pastries, pizza dough, muffins, bread sticks and seasonal products. The basic ones are the most popular, says the owner. Kaiser and torpedo rolls are big sellers, as well as plain, cinnamon raisin and blueberry bagels.

“When I was growing up, it was plain and egg bagel, that was it,” he says. “All the other ones are offshoots of somebody’s imagination. There’s an area near Mexico that wants just green chili bagels.”

Guttenplan’s has about 100 different formulas that can be shaped into different sizes and shapes. For example, one basic rye bread dough comes in eight different forms including a round loaf and a big long sandwich loaf. The company’s 70,000-square-foot plant runs eight different lines at a time. On each line, a mixer blends the item and sends it to a forming machine. The shaped dough then enters the blast freezer, where it goes around and around on a spiral carousel for 45 minutes to an hour and a half, and comes out frozen. The product is electronically counted in bulk quantities, boxed, sealed, identified (every ingredient is tracked), put on a pallet and stored in a 28,000-square-foot, four-story holding freezer. It is held in the minus-10-degree-Fahrenheit freezer for 48 hours to “equilibrate” and then is shipped out over the next three days to customers from New England to Texas.

And, though Guttenplan doesn’t work weekends as his father did, he says he still has plenty to keep him busy. On a typical day, he consults with supervisors, plant managers and sales people, often making sales calls himself. He is always looking at new equipment, new production methods and new ways to ensure quality. Ever-changing trends keep him on his toes, whether it’s demand for low-carb breads or the current craze for whole grains. He also pays close attention to economic factors and environmental issues that ultimately affect his business.

“We’re now seeing markets that are concerned about sustainability and the environment. We’ve changed our boxes to biodegradable, put in new energy-efficient lighting and try to recycle our wastewater,” Guttenplan says. “We eliminate packaging whenever we can. We’ve learned that it can be very difficult to make a massive change in one particular item, but if you make a lot of little ones and keep working at it, you’ll make progress in the right direction.”

Consolidation of their industry has left many customers seeking more personal attention, and Guttenplan’s has been able to provide it. Growing at a pace of about 5 to 8 percent each year, the company is expanding its plant to add new production lines, freezers and other manufacturing equipment. Though Jack is not certain if his children, Adam, Ariel and Aaron, will ever join the family business, he knows that it offers a better lifestyle today than it did when he took his father’s place. “I try to take as many vacations as I can!” he says.

– Sharon Huss Roat, AS ’87

Jack and Patsy Guttenplan live in Little Silver, N.J. Their daughter, Ariel, is a University of Delaware sophomore.