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8 Ways To Improve Your Bakery Business
8 ways to improve your bakery business and stay ahead of the competition!
While baking bread and running a bakery seems like a job for anyone, only true business acumen will guarantee success. With small margins and fierce competition with massive bakery conglomerates, you really must hit the needle in the haystack to succeed running a bakery. Or do you?
Bakery consultants Baron Foodtech from Finland, the land of a thousand lakes and rye bread, with more than decades of bakery experience, gives their 8 pieces of advice how to run a successful industrial bakery. Each advice highlights first the problem, then the solution. Enjoy the read and let’s bake some bread!
1# Follow the trends. Bakery business develops, so should you
Bakery business is often considered as a conservative business with old recipes, cost efficient baking and mass production dictating the bakery business model. Many bakeries even pride with their long company history as a source of success. Here however also lies a caveat. Bakeries should constantly follow new trends considering the whole bakery business, as energy efficiency with today’s energy cost increases, optimizing bakery output, new baking machinery vs upgrading existing machinery, new taste trends, better logistics and find the right people and experts for your business. Bakery business is sometimes small margin business and therefore bakeries should constantly find ways to improve margins to stay competitive.
This means that bakery management should be constantly on the know and be ready to act immediately when there are new ways for improvement. Typical ways for staying in the know are exhibitions, workshops and other information sharing events, but these have been down to basically zero during the past years due to covid. Consider therefore using external bakery consultants like Baron Foodtech who works constantly with different kinds of bakery consulting projects around the world with more than 30 years of bakery business experience. They are always on the know, as that is their business model, ready to develop your bakery business.
2# Frequently evaluate your bakery's total efficiency and capacity, never just parts
Bakeries are essentially production facilities where efficiency and production capacity play a major role for success. Bakery machinery will however at some point become outdated, have flaws, need for new production processes and similar problems that will need new solutions. A seemly logical solution is to upgrade your existing machinery or make some machinery specific improvements, but here is where many bakeries typically go wrong. The machinery upgrade may work, but the whole production line may not be in sync at all. The ones who sell the machinery focuses on selling the machinery, not on how to implement it in the whole bakery production process. It might look attractive to have the fanciest machinery, but, it may ultimately just make things worse.
The bakery should therefore focus on how a solution can improve the whole bakery process, with clear calculations of efficiency and capacity, how to tackle bottlenecks, and eventually payback time for the investment. Implement a lean thinking to the whole process, improve automation and decrease personnel input in the actual production process. Baron Foodtech helps here bakeries to be a neutral consultant that can evaluate in an honest way how functional the existing bakery is, how to improve bakery output, what investments are feasible and how to make the bakery investment profitable. By involving Baron Foodtech already in the early planning process, you can guarantee that your bakery will make the correct choices already from the beginning, saving time, money and take your bakery to next level.
3# Develop your bakery products, both existing and new ones
All bakeries are trying to develop new products and improve existing ones, but as bakeries often are kind of conservative, nothing happens before some competitors develop a new successful product. That’s the time when the bakeries wake up and start doing what? Copying the idea from the competitors. Very few bakeries have in-house a highly creative team that comes up constantly with new ideas and instead a long stalemate occurs. Product development becomes reactive, not proactive.
Your bakery should drive a proactive product development culture where new ideas are frequently required from the management. Don’t just give the task to one product development person but try to get influx from others as well in your bakery team. Consider also using external consultants for new creative ideas like companies do employ advertising agencies for new creative ways of communications. Baron Foodtech test bakery in Finland Nastola, is an excellent creative hub where your bakery personnel can develop and improve bakery products sparring together with Baron Foodtech experts. Your bakery will get new fresh ideas and ultimately together with external consultants develop new products that takes your bakery success to new levels, including accurate calculations of product profitability.
4# Your excellent sourdough can be even better with propionic sourdough
Sourdough is one of the most important components of your bakery products, guaranteeing quality and prolonging shelf life. With longer shelf life, your bakery products become more attractive as it will decrease wastage and be overall more attractive for retailers. However, as retailers are constantly asking for better shelf life without forbidden additives, you can improve the shelf life in a natural way by using propionic sour dough.
Bakeries have been traditionally using acidic sourdough of pH less than 4 and TTA (total titratable acidity) 15-20. Main acids produced by lactic acid bacteria are lactic and acetic acid. Other types of sourdough are exo- and propionic sourdough. Exosourdough contains exopolysaccharides more than lactic acid and other organic acids. Exopolysaccharides are produced by lactic acid bacteria. Exopolysaccharides act as thickening agents and stabilizer in dough. In propionic sourdough lactic acid bacteria produce propionic acid besides of lactic acid. If a baker wants to produce clean label bread with longer shelf life, usage of propionic sourdough offers a practical solution. However, it requires a little bit more training and care than that of ordinary sourdough. Baron Foodtech has been researching the use of propionic sour dough for several years and can now guide your bakery team how to implement the use of propionic sourdough to your bakery products.
5# Back to basics with slow baking for improved quality
High volume baking production has been the mantra for successful bakeries. This has come at a cost where additives and other artificial ingredients were included for better production properties and longer shelf lives. Consumers are though today voting with their money, preferring natural and healthier bakery products with real ingredients.
Slow baking has been considered the traditional way of baking with the use of only natural ingredients and long baking times for natural quality. This is today possible in even the highest output bakeries, guaranteeing better bakery produce properties, natural taste, no additives, long fermentation times, taking back the baking process to its original roots. Give your clients what they want, stay on the trend, and consider transforming your baking processes to slow baking as well. Baron Foodtech knows the secret how to implement slow baking to your bakery in a functional and profitable way, guiding your team to transform the baking process.
6# Involve your employees in planning and improvements
Bakeries are typically clearly hierarchical with a small number of white collars to a massive number of blue collars in the bakery environment. The general planning and production improvements are usually handled by the management and bakery experts, which seems logical as they are doing what they are appointed to do. This format though effectively decreases opportunities for valuable insights from your staff at the baking grounds.
Involve your employees to give their insights on how to improve production output and guide what are the problems in the production, machinery, and other bottlenecks. These employees may have decades of working experience at the bakery, but they have not ever been taught to highlight what could be wrong with machinery and what other improvements could be considered. The hierarchy may also cause the employees to be even afraid to say what they think, and therefore rather keep on working as usually. Baron Foodtech has often been the catalysator for involving employees more in the overall bakery production process, acting as a mediator, asking the right questions and finding useful insights from the bakery personnel. Sometimes it is much easier to talk to someone that is not your boss or working partner, but instead talk to an outside expert who is neutral and ready to listen.
7# Fix it before it is broken, keep your bakery maintenance as highest priority
Also in bakery business, too many react that something is wrong when the machinery is already not working. Why fix something when it’s not broken? Well, machinery will be broken if it is not carefully serviced as scheduled. We like to call it service debt, where late service and maintenance causes bottlenecks in automation processes, wastage increases and a need for more employees to guarantee continued output and deliveries to clients. Many bakeries consider maintenance as an additional cost, but if carried out correctly, it will be an investment that pays back in dividends.
Generally, there is no need to service all machinery and processes at same time. Instead schedule maintenance team for different timings throughout a service period. This will minimize possible downtime and keep your machinery on par with today. Also consider the maintenance and service as a possibility for improvement of your production, adding new ideas and proactive thinking of where to take your bakery. A rule of thumb for most professional bakeries is to have a 2 year ahead mentality, guaranteeing your bakery machinery and production is always ahead of the need. With Baron Foodtech, you will get consulting that will help plan the production line service schedule, add creative inputs, estimate efficiency and productivity, better handle maintenance teams and add additional years of high performance.
8# Dare to use external help for competitive advantage
Pride, traditions, and long company history are considered valuable and highly important attributes for a successful bakery. At the same time, these attributes may also be a road to ruin. The bakery gets blinded in their own thinking of superiority, missing out hints of new innovative ways to develop. And yet again, there are many successful bakeries that have long experience and traditions that keeps on rocking. Part of their success is that they dare to use external help for competitive advantage.
Baron Foodtech bakery consultants have successfully consulted 50 bakeries around the globe, improved business models, relocated bakeries, handled bakery green field investments, developed success story recipes, upgraded bakery machinery and act as a close ally to the bakeries management. One of the secrets of success has been Baron Foodtech’s long experience, unique knowledge and always on the know what is going on in the bakery business. But what really has guaranteed the successful bakery consulting cases have been the client who has been ready to give responsibility to external bakery consultants such as Baron Foodtech. They were ready to take the next step for success.
FAQ
What kind of bakeries do Baron Foodtech work with? Size? Location?
Baron Foodtech consults a wide range of bakeries, focusing primary on industrial baking. With industrial baking, we highlight bakeries that have bigger baking processes than a minor one-person bakery.
Baron Foodtech serves clients all over the world with experience from Nordic countries, Europe, Middle East, and CIS countries.
If I would like to use external bakery consultants like Baron Foodtech, how much do the bakery consulting services cost?
Baron Foodtech offers a full spectrum of bakery consulting services. For starter, we talk with the client first by phone, where after a meeting will be set up if Baron Foodtech is the perfect fit for your company. Based on the meeting, Baron Foodtech will prepare a general project proposal with project pricing for the whole project. The pricing is based on estimated hours for the project.
If I would like to develop new recipes for my bakery, with focus on new trendy products like vegan birthday cakes, can Baron Foodtech assist here? And what will it cost?
Sure, Baron Foodtech is following the latest trends and can most definitely help in develop vegan birthday cakes. The step for cooperation is that you contact Baron Foodtech with your specific request, Baron Foodtech prepares a proposal with timing and cost, and after that starts the test baking in the Baron Foodtech test bakery. For the best possible success, it is recommended that you also participate in the planning and baking process at Baron Foodtech location in Finland, Nastola. Expect couple of days baking, and you will have your birthday cakes.
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