Not all are vulnerable Giglio and Cecilia Gai made their first loaves of bread by hand, baking them at night in a wood-fired oven. The operation hasn't moved in 93 years, but Gai's Northwest Bakeries now takes up two blocks and oversees satellite facilities on Seattle's Sixth Avenue, in Redmond and at four bakeries in Spokane and Oregon. It typifies food processing, relying so deeply on technology that it would appear at first glance to be particularly vulnerable to a Y2K problem. On the bun line, a panel with dozens of red lights shows the programmable-logic controller flashing through the syncopated motions of kneading, pumping, loading, proofing and baking. Each minute, the line turns out 800 perfectly formed Kaiser rolls - just one of 1,484 baked goods ranging from cookies and donuts to New York Bagel Boys bagels and rolls for Jack in the Box Sourdough Jacks.
Bread trucks have printers to produce invoices.
At night, the hand-held computers download the day's information and place the next day's orders. On top of national sales to independent distributors, the company juggles 250 delivery routes and cranks out 25 million pounds of baked goods a month. Some 14 million pounds come out of the Seattle bakeries, where nearly half the flour used comes from Fisher Mills. While chips come into play throughout the production line, it turns out that none are date sensitive. For its front-office computing, the company is, in large part, tackling the problem with cash, upgrading PCs that Keith Van Emmerik, the company controller, figures would have had to be upgraded anyway.