Zellerbäck bakery

Beate Zeller is the fourth generation of her family to run the traditional Zellerbäck bakery in Friedrichshafen. With six stores and three mobile bakery vans, Zellerbäck makes sure its loyal customers can get hold of their favourite baked goods and pastries at local markets and in the wider Lake Constance area.

Nine bakers, three pastry chefs and a team of sales staff work in the bakery stores, busily conjuring up that special Zellerbäck experience. Together, they strive to develop, bake and try out new recipes, with everyone from the bakers to the sales team rating how good each one tastes.

"The discount chains gave us quite a knock, so we had to rethink things and move with the times. That meant offering customers the option of enjoying coffee, cakes and snacks in-house wherever we had enough space." Five of the stores were refitted accordingly, and their latest café, which seats about 70 people, opened its doors just a few months ago in a newly built medical centre in Friedrichshafen. Just like in their other stores, the new café enables customers to choose from Zellerbäck's full range of speciality baked goods and pastries, with staff baking the dough pieces themselves on site.

"Baking products in the store is time-consuming," Beate Zeller acknowledges, "so it would be impossible for them to do that while also serving customers and washing dishes by hand. We needed to make our employee's lives easier, so we decided to purchase a fast and efficient dishwashing machine from MEIKO.

It was an easy choice to make, because we already have two large commercial dishwashers from MEIKO in our production area – a rack type dishwashing machine (K15) and a glass, utensil and dish washer (FV 130.2) – and we're very satisfied with both of them."

The new arrivals in the Zellerbäck stores were the MEIKO M-iClean U with GiO module and the FV 40.2G with GiO module, and the machines run at full capacity throughout the day. The café at the medical centre also has a M-iClean U glass and dishwasher on hand, providing sparkling results in a user-friendly package. It tackles all the dirty dishware from the café in a fast and energy-efficient manner. "It takes just three minutes to get the washware clean, and none of it needs any extra drying or hand polishing," says staff member Svenja Meschenmoser.

"It's such a change from before, now everything is running brilliantly, totally automatically, and none of us had any problem learning how to use it." Zeller is equally pleased: "MEIKO dishwashing technology not only takes the strain off our staff, but also ensures everything is washed properly and hygienically. Stubborn stains on dishware are something you learn to accept in the café business, from milk and cream residues to dried food on plates. Fortunately, MEIKO dishwashers get everything reliably and consistently clean– all day, every day. Now I can't imagine running either our bakery or cafés without these machines! MEIKO gives us everything we need.“