The time is coming. The holiday season is officially upon us. Before you know it, Thanksgiving and Christmas will be here. Bakers everywhere feel the season changing and know its time to start planning for the increase in customers and product demand.
Between Thanksgiving pies, Christmas cookie trays, Hanukkah sufganiyot, panettone, stollen, and more, the stretch from November to the new year is where bakeries tend to make their biggest profits. It's also the time of year when bakeries realize they are unequipped to handle the production demand or their equipment breaks down.
This in-depth guide covers all of the holiday bakery equipment that helps separate shops that ride the wave from shops that get flattened by it. You may think it's too soon to start thinking about the holidays, but now is the time. Between lead times, installation, and training, it takes time to properly equip your bakery to succeed during the holiday season. You don’t want to be regretting it in November and December when you are turning away orders because you simply can’t withstand the production demands.
Why Holiday Volume Breaks Bakeries
The holiday season can completely flip a bakery on its head. You go from your usual production and sales to a massive increase almost overnight.
You go from a steady 300 cookies a day to 2,000 on a Tuesday to fill a corporate order for a holiday party. The increase in bread production puts your ovens capacity and heat retention to the test. Your dough mixer that "usually gets the job done" is now mixing from 4 a.m. to close, just to try and keep up with the holiday increases.
Holiday prep isn't about buying more of everything. It's about identifying the bottleneck in your production line and removing it before it becomes a 2 a.m. problem. Let's walk the line.
1. Commercial Mixers: The First Bottleneck Every Bakery Hits
We see it every year. Bakeries are not able to meet demand due to an undersized mixer. Bakeries are at the mercy of their mixer's capacity, and if they mix beyond the machine's capacity, they run the risk of burning the mixer out. It's the one piece of equipment that touches nearly every product, so when it's undersized, everything behind it stalls.
What to look for in a mixer:
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Capacity that matches your peak, not your average. If you're routinely running back-to-back batches to fill a single order, you're already undersized. A larger bowl means fewer batches, fewer cleanouts, and fewer hours.
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Heavy-duty motors and gearing. The holiday orders are demanding. You do not want to run your mixer into the ground, leaving you in a tough spot. You want to ensure you equip your shop with a mixer that has a sturdy and rugged construction and can withstand the workload. Stiff cookie and bread doughs, enriched brioche, laminated dough starters, and dense fruit-and-nut breads all put real load on a mixer. Light-duty mixers are an issue just waiting to happen!
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A second mixer. This is the unglamorous answer, but having the option of mixing two different types of products at once is a game-changer. It's also insurance. If one machine goes down, you're still in business.
Empire's IRIS Spiral Mixer line is built for exactly this kind of sustained commercial workload, with sizes that scale from neighborhood bakeries to wholesale production. The IRIS is one of the most popular bread dough mixers in the industry, but if you.
2. Ovens: Where Capacity Actually Lives
Your oven is the heartbeat of your bakery. Having an oven that is reliable and offers high-capacity baking is crucial during the holiday rush. Oven capacity is the hard ceiling on holiday output, and it's the equipment decision with the longest lead time, so it deserves the most planning.
Rack Ovens for High-Volume Runs
If your holiday season is defined by cookies, rolls, sheet cakes, and anything that lives on a sheet pan, a rack oven is the single biggest capacity multiplier you can add. Roll a full rack in, roll a full rack out. Consistent airflow, even color, minimal babysitting.
Empire's rack ovens are designed for precisely the kind of repeatable, high-throughput baking that holiday production demands. From compact rack oven designs to double rack ovens for maximum capacity, Empire offers rack ovens that can produce large quantities of products that will bake evenly and consistently.
Deck Ovens for Artisan Breads and Signature Items
For crusty holiday artisanal breads, a deck oven delivers the stone-baked bottom crust and radiant heat that convection simply can't replicate. Empire's MiniTube, LFKR, and Ultimate-LF gas deck ovens and LFMD & ENERGY electric deck ovens cover everything from compact footprints to serious multi-deck production.
Not sure which oven type fits your holiday menu? Our deck oven vs. convection oven guide breaks down the tradeoffs.
3. Cookie Depositors: The Holiday MVP Nobody Talks About
Cookie machines are one of those things that you didn’t realize how much you needed until you have one. They are also the type of machines that quickly end up paying for themselves in terms of increased sales and money saved on labor costs. Here's a number that gets bakery owners' attention: a cookie depositor can turn a task that takes two people several hours into a job one person finishes before their coffee gets cold.
Holiday cookie season is a volume game. Corporate gift boxes, cookie trays, cookie exchanges, and school orders all hit at once. Manually piping and hand-scooping all of those cookies is time-consuming and slow, inconsistent, and puts a major wear and tear on staff.
A cookie depositor gives you:
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Uniform size and weight on every cookie, which means even baking, predictable food cost, and trays that look professional.
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Maximum versatility from one machine. Wire-cut, drop, rosette, and filled cookies without changing your whole process.
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Speed that scales. The difference between "we can take that order" and "sorry, we're booked."
If cookies are even 15 percent of your holiday revenue, a depositor typically pays for itself faster than any other piece of equipment on this list.
4. Production Equipment: Consistency at Scale
Dinner rolls. Bagels. Buns. Pie Crusts. Challah. The holidays are full of products that need to be portioned into hundreds of identical pieces, and doing that by hand is where labor hours quietly disappear.
Production equipment is the labor-saving solution that also saves you time and money. Dough dividers, dough rounders and dough sheeters are the unsung heroes and the hardest-working members of your bakery.
A dough divider portions a batch into equal pieces in seconds. Pair it with a dough rounder or a dough divider/rounder and you've got the power of a full team of bakers in small, compact machines. The time these machines will save you during the holiday rush is extremely valuable and time you can better spend on other tasks.
Croissants, puff pastry, rugelach and other laminated pastries are all popular holiday products and mass-producing them is a tall task. A commercial dough sheeter lets you roll and laminate large sheets quickly and evenly, so your pastry team can produce holiday morning boxes and pie orders without the bottleneck of manual rolling.
Pies are also a huge product during the holiday season and producing pie crusts at scale is a major project. Dough sheeters are a major tool to have when producing enough pies to keep up with the holiday demand. If pies and laminated pastries are a big Thanksgiving product for you, a sheeter is the difference between 50 pie shells and 500.
Plan Your Holiday Production With Empire
Since 1977, Empire Bakery Equipment has helped bakeries across the country prepare for their busiest seasons, from neighborhood cookie shops to wholesale operations running around the clock.
If you're not sure where your bottleneck is, that's exactly what our Dream Builders™ consulting team is for. We'll look at your product mix, your volume, and your space, and map out what you actually need (and what you don't). You can also see mixers, deck ovens, rack ovens, and depositors running live at our Baking Center showroom on Long Island before you commit to anything.
The holidays reward the bakeries that plan ahead. Let's make sure yours is one of them.
