Ask Paul: I Need a Custom Pan, but I Don’t Know Where to Start?

At LloydPans, we talk (and write) quite a bit about custom pans. And there’s good reason. We work with a lot of our customers to develop custom pan solutions, and we sell quite a few custom pans.

Your question is a common one, because many people in the baking, pizza and foodservice industries have an unnecessary apprehension when it comes to custom pans. How much are they, how many do I have to buy, where do I even start? This apprehension is unnecessary. Sure custom pans may not be an easy process for some pan suppliers, but we’ve established a reputation around our ability to deliver custom pans with minimal hassles.

 So what does the process of ordering custom pans look like? For starters, it’s never the same from customer to customer. We are talking about custom pans. It generally starts with a need: our customer can’t find standard commodity pans that perform well enough, or properly fit the food product to accomplish the job. From there, here is what general happens.

Step One: Receive Customer Request - Whether it’s a new product idea or operational change to gain greater efficiencies, we get quite a few custom requests from all sorts of industries. Our team hasn’t met a challenge yet we haven’t embraced and succeeded.

Step Two: Fact Find – Our team of pan solutions experts will gather basic information to start finding a solution. We’ll need to know about cooking/baking equipment, food product description and desired process outcome. We also look to see if there is an existing solution or pan.

Step Three: On-Site Visit (optional) – Depending on the complexity of the product, we may visit your facility to gain a better understanding of your process environment.

Step Four: Design First-Pass Solution – Our engineers take all of the input we have to date and design a concept to fit your needs.

Step Five: Prototype – Pending review and updates to the initial concept, our team develops a prototype pan and conducts testing in our kitchen.

Step Six: Customer Testing – Once we achieve the results we’re looking for in our test kitchen, we ship the custom pan to our customer for testing in a live environment. Based on these tests, we’ll tweak the design as necessary until it meets all of our customer’s objective.

Step Seven: Production – We have an approved pan, and will now ramp up production to meet demand.
See, nothing to be apprehensive about! Learn more about some of our custom pan solutions and reach out to our team to learn more about custom baking and pizza pans.