Jan
15

How to Make Your Bakery More Efficient and Profitable

Posted on January 15, 2021 by Ash Bennett

To make things more efficient for your bakery, we can start with eliminating waste and applying lean practices for your business. For example, we can minimise or eliminate waste of movement and processing (e.g. using bake and serve boxes where you don’t have to transfer containers and wash baking tins and pans).

Make your bakery more efficient and profitable

Achieving greater efficiency means delivering the exact same result while using less time and fewer resources. It’s still the same outcome but there’s less cost and time involved. Here, being more efficient also means being more profitable.

In bakeries, there are several movements and processes that we can make more efficient (or remove them in the first place). All that’s unnecessary should be removed or minimised so that we can use fewer resources as well as better focus on our customers and developing new exciting products.

A huge opportunity for that is in washing baking pans and tins. It can be time-consuming and the task is required each day whether you make a lot of sales or not. Also, you’ll still use boxes and packages anyway no matter how you prepare your baked goods. In that process we’ll see wasted time and valuable resources (including water and cleaning solutions).

But if the boxes are used for most of the preparing, baking and serving, there will be less movement and that we avoid using and washing the baking pans and tins. Also, there’s less chance for mistakes because almost everything happens in a single container or box. This is an example of eliminating waste and making your background processes more efficient.

Another excellent example is in focusing on fewer baked goods instead of trying to please all customers. This is counter-intuitive because we know that customers seek variety and they expect everything to be available from a single place. However, focusing on a few products can help us become the best in those. Aside from greater efficiency (less inventory, fewer preparations and processes), we’ll have more time perfecting the recipe and there’s something that will set us apart from the competition. Instead of spreading ourselves thin, we aim to be the best at something.

Those are just some of the ways to make our operations more efficient and hence improve our profitability. Sure there will be more opportunities in your bakery as we take note of the sources and causes of waste especially when it comes to movement. Once you spot those opportunities and work on them, it will make a huge difference to your business.