We studied the potential of various machine learning and statistical methods in the prediction of product quality in industrial bakery processes. The methods included classification and regression tree, decision list, neural network, support vector machine and Bayesian learning algorithms as well as statistical multivariate methods. Our data originated from two industrial bakery processes: a sourdough rye bread and a Danish pastry process. In our studies, the Naive Bayesian algorithm turned out to be the best classifier building algorithm while the partial least squares (PLS) method was the best regression method. The prediction accuracy of these models improved significantly by pruning the original set of variables. In this study, two response variables could be predicted on a level that justifies further study: rye bread pH could be predicted with high accuracy with Naive Bayesian Classifier, and Danish pastry height could be predicted with a moderately high correlation with PLS. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.