Scored pretzel bite apparatus and method

A method of making one or more soft pretzel bites, comprising:

• providing one or more conveyors proximately beneath a sequence of:
• (i) one or more disc cutters;
• (ii) one or more wheel cutters;
• (iii) one or more cone rollers;
• (iv) one or more lateral cutting guillotines;
• (v) a caustic bath;
• and
• (vi) an oven;
• conveying a dough sheet to the one or more disc cutters that separate and trim a dough sheet into parallel one or more dough strips;
• conveying the parallel dough strips to the one or more wheel cutters that cut a series of transverse slots on one lateral side of the one or more dough strips, each transverse slot terminating a proximal distance to the one lateral side and spaced so that at least one transverse slot is received in each eventual pretzel bite and extending beyond a midpoint of the respective dough strip;
• conveying one or more dough strips to the one or more cone rollers that roll each one of the one or more of the transverse slotted dough strips into a respective rolled dough strip, exposing each transverse slot across the rolled dough strip;
• conveying the rolled dough strip to the one or more lateral cutting guillotines that transversely cut each rolled dough strip into one or more dough bites;
• conveying the one or more dough bites through a caustic bath that washes each dough bite in a caustic solution;
• and
• conveying the washed dough bites through the oven that bakes the washed dough bite into a soft pretzel bite,
• wherein each transverse slot allows a volume of the soft pretzel bite to increase without being constrained by a pretzel skin formed around each transverse slot to aerate an interior of each pretzel bite.