The bad news is that they work well and keep getting better. For pizza crafters, a conveyor oven is like those new dairy-case tubes of chocolate chip cookie dough, while a deck oven is like mixing your own toll-house cookie dough. Though the con­veyor oven is easier and faster, a “no brainer,” how does it compare with the deck oven in individuality, creativity and artistry?

For many pizza businesses, the conveyor oven is a sound investment. It’s faster than a deck oven and able to han­dle continuous loads. Since little skill is required, operating one (or more) cuts down on hiring and training of more expensive, better skilled personnel.

 How They Work

Nearly everyone has seen a conveyor oven by now, those long, squat, stainless-steel boxes with metal mesh conveyors that slowly and relentlessly creep along. Usually, a pizza must be placed on a pan or a screen before sliding it into the conveyor’s open maw.

Once inside, the pie is cooked by one of two different methods: blown hot air or infrared radiation. Cooking with blown hot air, “forced convection,” involves manipulating columns of super-heated air blown across the top and the bottom of the pie as it passes through the oven. Different manufacturers call their columnated convection by different names, but the process is basically the same. The rapidly moving hot air rips away the layer of coolness surrounding the pizza and applies its heat directly to the surfaces of the pie in the pan.

“When you start to transfer heat and energy into a food product,” says Tom Kurgan of Lincoln Foodservice Products, “the first thing that you have to do is eliminate the cold insulation barrier around the food.” “Air impingement,” explains Lincoln’s Chick Heitgaus, “is a way of managing the convected and heated air so that it focuses the air in hundreds of little columns, almost like a hair dryer except in much narrower columns, right on the food product as it’s going by so you don’t lose heat to the ambient air.”

Baking in forced convection ovens can be controlled by changing the conveyor belt velocity, the above  and below the belt temperature of the air, the speed at which the air is blown, and by adjusting the location of air columns with add-on “fingers.”

Infrared radiation works a lot like a deck oven, diffusely projecting its heat to the top and bottom surfaces of a black, anodized pan. “Everybody knows that the best oven to cook a pizza is a stone [hearth] oven,” says Constantin Burtea, owner of Q Industries Food Equipment. He is one of the original designers of forced convection and has since switched to infrared with the invention of his Q-Matic oven.

‘The disadvantage [with blown air] is your toppings and the sauces are drying out. Instead of having the direct heat exchange between the stone and the dough, we are using black anodized pizza pans, and we project in those pans the infrared energy from our radiant heaters.

Baking in infrared ovens is controlled by the speed of the conveyor and the top and bottom temperatures in various “heat zones".  

Owners Love Them

Once the commitment to a conveyor-style pizza is made, every pizzeria owner we contacted expressed a high degree of satisfaction. Even tough they sometimes had switched models, once they started working with a conveyor, they were hooked. Their reasons are simple: standardized pizza quality, improved cooking time, higher volume, lower energy costs and decreased employee salaries.

Set aside any prejudices about uniform cookie-cutter pizzas for a moment. Deck ovens require trained, and therefore more expensive, personnel. When a pizza goes into a deck, it creates a cool spot on the oven’s surface. Some ovens have hotter cooking areas than others. Pizzas need to be rotated, moved around, and carefully limed. Every lime the oven door is opened, heat escapes.

‘When you need deck ovens the most,” Bob Driscoll of Blodgett Oven Company says, “productivity falls off, and it stresses the skill of the baker to maintain quality. The conveyor oven has the ability to maintain production at peak times. If you have it set at seven minutes, it will continue to bake at seven minutes.”

In other words, once the prepared dough goes in, it comes out the other end cooked exactly the same as every other pie. No skill is required. Although,” You’ve got to have somebody at the other end. Otherwise it backs up,” says Alice Tooks, laughing. She’s manager of a Little Caesars franchise.

“I don’t burn myself on conveyors, though. I used to burn myself all the time.”

Because almost every model convey­or oven currently available is stackable, owners can start with one, and, if demand increases, double or triple their production instantly without decreasing floor space.

 Solving Problems

When introduced almost 20 years ago, conveyor ovens were known to be noisy and unreliable. In order to survive, manufacturers have had to considerably improve the quality of conveyor ovens. “Almost all of the brands were noisy,” says Blodgett’s Bob Driscoll. “Air movement creates noise. We had to figure out how to move the air efficiently and damper the noise. Just as in your home you don’t want the heating and cooling ducts to whine and rumble every lime the furnace comes on.

Nevertheless, conveyors are still louder than deck ovens. A cook accustomed to a quiet kitchen will notice the difference. Depending on where your telephone communications center is, you may need to move the phone to cut down on noise.

The incidence of conveyor oven breakdowns has continued to decline over the years. Operators we interviewed, by and large, were satisfied with their machines’ performances, which is important because repairs are expensive. Since conveyor ovens have many moving parts, a lot can go wrong.

Arthur and Louis Vourtsa, co-owners of Athens Pizza in Haverhill, Massachusetts, say that when their Lincoln Impinger broke down twice, repairs ran about $1,400. “In three years, it broke down a couple times,” says Arthur Vourtsa. “It cost a lot of money to fix a little thing. But it only took a couple hours.”

‘They are expensive to fix,” says Jim Bartholomew of Jbart, who is president of the Lincoln Food Council Advisory Board. However, Bartholomew says that the costs of repair are modest in comparison to the money saved by hiring less skilled workers. ‘When you’re doing 100 pizzas an hour, the conveyor will pay for itself. It’ s all in the in­creased productivity.”

 The key to the success of conveyor-style pizza is volume. Purchased new, conveyor ovens can cost four times as much as deck ovens. Most pizzerias just starting out won’t have the kind of capital to buy a conveyor from the out­set. If the pizza restaurant is designed to be a small operation, profitable but modest, then the high cost of a conveyor oven may be too much. Even though a lot of energy is lost every time it’s opened and closed, a deck oven can be cheaper to run during slow times, since conveyors are designed to be on at full power all day.

“Ideally, if you want to use a conveyor, you want a busy location to justify using it,” says David Condon, a chef at Bakers Pride Oven Company, which makes both infrared conveyors and traditional brick ovens. “If you’re working in the situation where you’re very busy for lunch and then dinner, but have two or three slow hours in between, it may not justify the cost of running it.”

If you are thinking about switching from your deck oven to a conveyor oven, a consideration more important than cost is your personal satisfaction with the conveyor product. If you have a well-established store, you must ask yourself whether the conveyor would produce as good a pizza as your deck oven already produces. Your customer base is already pleased with your pies, otherwise you wouldn’t have the capital to switch. Are they going to notice and perhaps be dissatisfied with the changes that the new oven brings?

Before purchasing a conveyor oven, try out your recipe using the oven you intend to buy. Work with the manufacturer to configure the oven’s temperature controls and fingers to produce the optimal bake for your product.

‘The only way I wouldn’t sell [a conveyor] ,“ says Denise McDonald of Middleby Marshall, “is if the customer is not happy with what’s coming out. Otherwise, it just makes it so easy for them. An owner with a good manager can leave the store he knows the product’s going to come out the same. As long as no one tampers with the heat, everything should be fine.