Market outlook indicates opportunities (and challenges) for OEMs.

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From gluten-free to whole grains, consumers are seeking to accommodate their increasingly busy lifestyles with healthier snacks and baked goods on the go. And according to PMMI’s 2012 Bakery & Snacks Market Assessment, sales of global bakery products are expected to increase 4.5% annually, reaching US $410 billion by 2015.

To meet this increasing demand, bakery and snack manufacturers are looking to OEMs for solutions to ramp up production. Those same machinery solutions must also be increasingly flexible to accommodate new packaging materials and formats, from variety packs to single serve. PMMI’s recent Bakery & Snacks Market Assessment identified the following machinery needs from bakery and snack manufacturers:

• Increased automation in the form of more robotics

• User-friendly HMIs (human machine interfaces)

• Graphic-based controls