Guides, checklists and definitions written for the plant director who has to approve a pilot, the process engineer who has to live with it and the quality manager who has to defend it in an audit.
Illustrative scenario: Plant run · one bread line, flour-lot change at the silo · shared oven. Not a measured run.
Each guide is written up with a design partner and shared on request. The summaries below are what they cover.
The qualification criteria we use: production volume or product value, existing mixing, proofing, oven or inspection systems and MES with API or OT access, an executive mandate on yield, waste, giveaway or energy, and a defined success metric for a paid pilot.
How giveaway, energy per unit, rise variance, colour and moisture variance and escape rate are defined and baselined, and where each number comes from in the plant.
Observe, recommend, approve to apply, bounded and exceptions: what the agent does, what the person does and what gate moves a loop from one level to the next.
How the audit log, kill-step verification, allergen status and lot genealogy sit under HACCP, FSMA, BRCGS and ISO 22000 procedures, and what Doughex deliberately does not take over.
The systems a design partner inventories before observe mode: PLC and SCADA, checkweighers, moisture and colour sensing, metal detection and X-ray, MES, cameras, meters, and the access each needs.
Tenant isolation, recipe and customer-spec protection, what stays on site, what can transfer as safe abstractions, and the on-prem option.
Every Doughex run is an ordered, inspectable sequence. This is run_scn_01, an illustrative scenario: Plant run · one bread line, flour-lot change at the silo · shared oven. Scenario complete · every stage inside spec · one human approval at the oven.
Plant Orchestrator · Pulled the product spec, the recipe, the HACCP plan with its bake kill-step and metal-detection control points, the allergen status of the line and the new flour lot's certificate from MES and the lab system; locked the target envelope for the run.
Plant Orchestrator · Simulated 24 candidate profiles across mix, proof, deposit and oven on the Bakesim as-baked twin for the new flour lot; ranked them on colour and moisture margin, weight margin, energy per unit and takt, and discarded every candidate that thinned the bake kill-step margin.
Dose-and-Mix · Adjusted hydration and mix energy for the new lot's absorption so dough temperature and development landed on target; dough state was handed to the proofer with its predicted rise curve.
Ferment-and-Proof · Predicted the rise curve from inline height, temperature, humidity and CO2, then trimmed proofer humidity and dwell so rise and volume landed on target instead of running fast on the fresher lot.
Makeup-and-Deposit · Fused checkweigher readings with dough state and divider feedback and trimmed the divider in real time so portion weight sat at the minimum safe margin above the declared weight, with the underweight guardrail armed.
Plant Orchestrator · The twin's lowest-energy candidate wanted a zone-three temperature outside the site's bounded envelope. Held for the shift process engineer, who approved the step with a tighter colour alarm.
Bake-and-Cool · Ran the oven against the twin's colour and moisture prediction; stepped zone temperatures and band speed toward the minimum-energy profile while predicted crust colour and crumb moisture stayed inside spec and the core-temperature kill step was verified on every reading.
Defect-and-Inspect · 12 camera streams at oven exit, cooler exit and packing at the plant edge: colour, shape, holes, cracks, foreign-body and seal checks on every unit; two pale-top rejects were attributed to a draught at zone one and the oven agent was notified.
Robot-and-Handling · Robotic depanning, tray transfers and packaging handling paced to the line, with rejected units diverted off the belt and the safe zone around each cell monitored.
Quality-and-Conformance · Lot released: flour lot, recipe, mix and proof setpoints, portion weights, oven profile, kill-step readings, inspection rejects and every human decision written to the genealogy and checked against spec and the HACCP plan.
Every tool invocation, argument and result is written to an immutable, human-readable log, and every reasoning step is expandable. Nothing about a run is hidden from the plant. The log below is the scenario run, not a measured one.
Goal, plan, thought, action, observation, exactly as the orchestrator would record it.
Start flour lot F-3312 on bread line BR-2, hold development, rise, weight, colour and moisture on target through the change, and release the lot with full genealogy.
Simulate the whole profile on the twin first. Lead with the mixer so the proofer gets dough with a known rise curve and the divider gets dough with a known density. Verify the bake kill step continuously. Let the oven chase minimum energy only inside the bounded envelope; hold anything beyond it for a person.
The standing recipe overshoots portion weight and runs the oven hot to protect against lot variability. With continuous dough-state, weight and colour estimates the margins can sit at their minimum safe values. The saving is giveaway and energy, not safety margin: the kill step is never a candidate for optimisation.
twin.simulate(candidates=24) → profile #7: minimum safe weight margin, kill-step margin unchanged, lowest predicted energy per unit.
Profile #7's zone-three temperature sits outside the site's bounded envelope. The policy engine routes that single write to the shift process engineer and permits the other eight.
Execute profile #7 at the bounded level: mixer, proofer and divider writes proceed; the zone-three write waits.
Approval granted at 05:53:09 with a tighter colour alarm. Two pale-top rejects at oven exit were attributed to a draught at zone one and corrected by the oven agent.
Scenario complete. The lot released with flour lot, setpoints, kill-step readings, inspection events and the human decision in the genealogy. No measured plant result is claimed; this is the run the platform is designed to execute.
The numbers Doughex is engineered against, from the GPU utilisation plan.
Design targets from the GPU utilisation plan. Nothing on this page is a measured plant result; measurements start when the first design-partner line runs in observe mode.
Where the design comes from.
The food-safety procedures Doughex's retrieval grounds on and its audit log is aligned to. Doughex supports these records; it is not a certification.
The packaged-food and convenience demand boom, the premium, health and gluten-free shift, private-label growth, sustainability and energy mandates, food-safety and allergen pressure, and a shrinking baker workforce, arriving as machine vision, inline moisture and weight sensing, edge AI, robotic handling and process twins mature.
A bakery does not go from manual to bounded control in one step. Doughex makes the level explicit per loop, auditable and reversible at any time, and some decisions never leave the person.
| Level | What the agent does | What the person does | When |
|---|---|---|---|
| Observe | Predicts rise, weight, colour, moisture and defects; writes nothing | Runs the bakery as today; compares predictions to QA checks | First phase with every design partner |
| Recommend | Proposes mix, proof, deposit and oven moves with the evidence behind each | A process engineer or baker approves or corrects each one | After accuracy is proven against the baseline |
| Approve to apply | Prepares the write; applies it only on a named person's approval | Approves per move; reviews the shift record | Once recommendations are trusted |
| Bounded | Writes low-risk oven, depositing and inspection setpoints inside explicit limits | Approves anything above the limits; reviews exceptions | After the food-safety and ROI gates agreed up front |
| Exceptions | Escalates anything outside its envelope, CCP-adjacent moves and release decisions | Always decides these; the agent never does | Permanent |
Doughex writes to production equipment in a food plant. Every capability is scoped, every write is policy-checked, every output is cited, and every action is written to an append-only audit log the plant owns.
| Item | Scope | Status |
|---|---|---|
| SOC 2 Type I | Cloud control plane | QUEUED Roadmap, first 6 months |
| SOC 2 Type II | Cloud control plane | QUEUED Roadmap, 6 to 12 months |
| HACCP · FSMA · BRCGS · ISO 22000 · allergen | Grounding and record-keeping | RUNNING Design basis for retrieval and the audit log |
| Per-tenant isolation | Data, memory, models | RUNNING Design rule |
| On-prem deployment | Recipe-sensitive bakeries | RUNNING Design option |
Doughex supports your food-safety records. It is not a certification and it does not replace your HACCP plan.
Doughex reads and writes through the systems already on the floor. No parallel historian, no new HMI, no rip-and-replace. Connectors are built against each design partner's stack first; long-tail integrations are out of scope for the first release.
PLC and SCADA of mixers, proofers, dividers and depositors, ovens, coolers and slicers
Setpoint reads, guarded writes, interlocks untouched
Checkweighers, inline moisture and NIR, thermal cameras, dough height, temperature and humidity
Continuous product and process state
Metal detectors and X-ray systems
Read and verified; reject interlocks stay the plant's
Orders, recipes, product specs, lot genealogy, allergen status
Targets in, release records out
Multi-camera stations at oven exit, cooler exit, slicer and packaging
Frames, defect events, reject commands
Plant and oven-level gas and electricity meters
Hard constraints for the oven profile and schedule
Isaac-driven depanning, tray transfer and packaging cells
Perception and motion for pans, trays and packs
SSO and role-based access; SOC 2 on the roadmap
Named approvers, scoped roles
The three people in an industrial bakery whose week changes when the line runs itself, and what each of them needs from Doughex.
Owns production rate, quality, waste, giveaway and yield, energy and food safety. Wants a bakery that holds spec at higher rate with fewer interventions, and a number that justifies the spend.
Owns recipes, dough development, proof and oven profiles, process windows and yield. Approves and corrects the agents in recommend mode; those corrections train the models.
Owns HACCP, FSMA, BRCGS, ISO 22000 and allergen conformance, foreign-body and defect conformance, and lot genealogy. Needs every action grounded, cited and written to an immutable record.
IT/OT and sustainability leads approve the deployment. There are no customer quotes on this site yet; design partners will speak for themselves when they choose to.
The questions plant directors, process engineers and quality managers ask in the first meeting.
Only at the autonomy level your plant has set, and only to an explicit allow-list of low-risk loops inside explicit limits. Every design partner starts in observe mode, where Doughex predicts and writes nothing. Recommend mode follows, where a process engineer approves each move. Bounded autonomy on oven, depositing and inspection loops comes after the food-safety and ROI gates agreed up front.
Critical control points are not optimisation variables. The bake kill step, metal detection and X-ray reject interlocks, allergen changeover and release decisions stay with your HACCP plan and your people. Doughex verifies readings, writes them to an immutable audit log and attaches them to the lot genealogy. It supports HACCP, FSMA, BRCGS, ISO 22000 and allergen records; it is not a certification and does not replace your plan.
Doughex sits above your existing automation as a supervisory layer. If it stops, the line keeps running on its current PLC and SCADA control and the interlocks it already has. A Doughex outage degrades the bakery to the way it runs today, not to a stop.
The first phase is observe mode on one line: Doughex reads your sensors, PLC history, QA checks and MES while you run the line as usual, and we measure its predictions against your own checkweigher, colour and moisture checks. Recommendations start when accuracy is proven against that baseline, and improve as plant-specific history and engineer corrections accumulate.
Recipes, product specs, tolerance models and customer specs are tenant-scoped and never used to train another customer's models. Retrieval is multi-tenant isolated and permission-aware. On-prem deployment is available for bakeries protecting sensitive recipes or private-label specs.
You are, the same as with any control strategy. That is why every write is policy-checked, bounded, logged and reversible, every output carries a citation to the recipe or procedure it relied on, and anything above your threshold waits for a named approver. The audit log records the request, the reasoning, the limits applied and the human decision.
As a design partner, on one line, with one hard metric: giveaway in grams per unit, energy per unit through the oven, downgrade and waste from under- or over-bake, or foreign-body and defect escapes. We instrument the line in observe mode, measure the baseline, move to recommend mode when accuracy is proven, and expand only when the number holds.
Full multi-module autonomy across the whole bakery, long-tail integrations beyond the design partners' stacks, and self-serve onboarding. The first release is one wedge workflow, its connectors, the agent loop with human checkpoints, the review console and the food-safety audit log.
Tell us who has to approve the pilot and we will send the guide written for them.
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