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I worked in two commercial bakeries: Angel and Berman in Jerusalem. The first mostly makes sandwich bread, the other one mostly makes pastry. This will be probably relevant to answering your question: if you want to realistically prevent cross-contamination, you will need separate set of everything, that is, a separate room with mixing bowls, separate ovens, and, well... the same employees won't be going between those two rooms, so, you need to hire more people to man more equipment. I was hired into both of these bakeries as a non-skilled labor who was paid minimum hourly wage. Baking bread isn't a particularly luxurious business. It's out there with agriculture, where margin of profit is very low, and your only hope is scale. Also, you cannot really increase bread consumption by baking more bread. The market is easily saturated. So, by forcing a bakery to, essentially, split in two, hire extra workers and install extra equipment, while in the end they'd not be able to sell more product is going to be very expensive. Maybe not even affordable. Now, consider that a very small minority of people buying bread care for it not being accidentally contaminated with sesame seeds, and your non-allergic bread will either have to cost ten times more than normal, or it won't be made at all. Needless to say that people with allergies will, likely, not want to buy overpriced bread. They might just not eat bread at all, if that's so dangerous. |
A company could do everything right and still would risk to be destroyed by an angry employee or plain boycott from a competitor. The only safe move is to stop making an everyday product with such legal risks.
Specially if is a niche product for a small number of potential clients. The reward of selling a few buns more does not worth the headache.