High-quality ingredients, alternative flours, mother yeast. Now that consumers have become much more careful not just about what they eat, but also about how food is prepared, the continuing evolution in the world of baking now also extends to the professional appliances involved. And these days that tends to be all about technology and the Internet of Things. “In the last five years also, we have made our company even more of a reference point for cooking and baking,” says the CEO of Moretti Forni, Mario Moretti. “We have reduced the energy consumption of our products by 30% and at the same time we have been working to improve their safety and ease of use, increasing the functional efficiency of our ovens, which are designed to be used by anyone at any time of the day, and also making the whole cooking process faster.” From croissants to pizzas, the “recipe” used by the Marche-based company is all about satisfying the caterer’s need for a multi-functional oven allowing them to work efficiently throughout the day from breakfast to dinner, which includes aperitif time and after-dinner moments. All of this is now possible – and the initial outlay is recouped very quickly – thanks to the technology which can now be applied to IoT devices that control the parameters and cooking programmes remotely. That approach has always been used by another big maker of ovens for pastries, bread and pizza: Zanolli. “As well as analysing market trends directly, the assessment and possible incorporation of demands from our agents and retailers into our production have always been at the heart of our R&D activities,” the Verona-based company points out, where the latest machines have indeed been devised as digital appliances, but “without depriving users of electro-mechanical options: many still prefer those methods because they find them to be the easiest way of doing things.” However, for anyone who primarily needs precision and versatility, the solution is a new ventilated oven for bread and pastries, offering six cooking cycles per programme and the possibility to time exactly when they put in the baking sheets and take them out in order to have the biggest batches, thus optimising productivity. A solution that was created “for small kitchens that think big.”