RETAILING

Orange Bakery has a lot of dough at stake. Pounds and pounds of it.

The Irvine-based company recently introduced the Salad Injector, a high-tech version of the venerable Vegomatic.

The trick is that besides crunching, munching and chopping veggies, fruit, sausage, cheese and what-have-you, the Salad Injector also stuffs the foodstuff into croissants, doughnuts and rolls.

And that’s where the dough comes in. The real idea behind Salad Injector is to sell more of Orange Bakery’s big products--raw and frozen croissants, Danish and puff pastry and sheets and blocks of dough.

With a $1,980 price tag (less for big orders, especially those that include dough bought from Orange Bakery), the machines aren’t likely to be snapped up by many retail consumers. But then, most people don’t need 250-500 sandwiches stuffed at the rate of one every eight seconds.

So far, Orange Bakery--a subsidiary of a Japanese food machinery maker, Rheon--has sold about 400 Salad Injectors, mostly to sandwich and grocery shops, said Mitch Silvani, western regional manager.