Bakery Production Process: The Steps, Timed Backward

A bakery's production process runs in ten steps: plan what to bake, scale the ingredients, mix, ferment, divide, shape, proof, bake, cool, and pack. For bread, those steps stretch across a day or two, so a small bakery plans them backward from the moment the bread has to be on the table, and the dough made today becomes tomorrow's loaves. The two places that decide the bakery's numbers are the first and the last: the plan, which sets how much is made, and the packing, where what came out good is counted, coded and dated. In the example below, 80 loaves of taro sourdough for a Saturday 8 am market start with the levain on Friday morning, go into the walk-in on Friday night and come out of the oven in four bakes from 3:15 on Saturday morning. Below are the ten steps, the timed schedule, where records belong, and what slips.

The short version

• Plan from orders and what usually sells, then work backward from when the bread is due.
• Scale by weight, from a recipe written for the batch size you actually make.
• Mixing, fermenting, dividing and shaping set the day's rhythm; the oven sets its limit.
• Overnight retarding moves the bake to the morning and the work to the afternoon before.
• Count what came out good, not what the recipe planned; that's what you sell and cost.
• Code and date every bake at packing, so any loaf traces back to its dough.
• TaroStack records the dough as its own batch and the loaves as another, linked by lot. More below.

The ten steps

How much to bake each day, with a bake sheet, is in bakery production planning, and how to scale a home recipe to batch size is in scaling recipes for production.

A market day, timed backward

Windward Roots, the made-up taro business I use in these examples, sells taro sourdough at a Saturday market that opens at 8 am. Eighty loaves, an oven that takes 20 at a time, and a 45-minute bake:

Reading it from the bottom: the van leaves at 7:15, so the last loaves must be cool by 7:00, so the last bake starts at 5:30, so four bakes start at 3:15, so the dough must be shaped and cold by Friday evening, so it's mixed at 2 pm, so the levain is built at 8 am. The oven is the limit: a fifth bake would push the last loaves past the van. How capacity sets what a kitchen can make is in how to calculate production capacity.

Where the records belong

Two steps carry the records that matter. At scaling, note the lot of each ingredient: the flour, the taro, the salt. At packing, count the loaves that came out good, give the bake a code and a best-by date, and put both on the label. Everything between is the process, where a dough temperature or a bake time is worth writing down if it ever goes wrong.

The overnight step creates the catch. The dough made on Friday is a thing of its own, with its own ingredients, and Saturday's loaves are made from it. If the flour's supplier recalls a lot, the trace runs from the flour to Friday's dough to Saturday's loaves to Saturday's customers. A bakery that writes down only "Saturday, 80 sourdough" can't make that trace. How lots run from ingredient to customer is in track ingredients by lot.

What slips

Where this stops working

On paper, the bakery runs on a whiteboard and a notebook: the bake sheet on Thursday, the levain on Friday, the count on Saturday morning at 6:45 when nobody has a free hand. The dough from Friday isn't recorded anywhere as a thing of its own, the flour lot is on a bag that went in the bin, and the six loaves that came out flat aren't in anyone's numbers.

How TaroStack does it

TaroStack records the dough and the loaves as what they are: two batches, linked by lot.

Doughs as sub-recipes. The levain and the dough are sub-recipes of the loaf, with units converted: buy flour by the 50 lb bag, bake by the gram. Friday's dough is recorded as a batch that takes flour, taro and salt off stock from the lots used, notes them automatically, and becomes a lot of its own. Saturday's bake takes from that dough lot, and the loaves go into their own lot with a best-by date.

What came out good. Recording the bake divides its cost by the loaves that came out good, and recipe truth checks, from your own batch history, whether the recipe yields what it says. Batch record forms carry your own fields, like dough temperature, with limits.

And the plan, on Standard. Planning works out what to make and when from orders and your own sales history, against work centers' hours, so the oven's limit is in the plan before 3 am finds it.

Recipes with sub-recipes, batches, lots and batch records are on every plan, from $49 a month; planning is on Standard at $99. The first 30 days are free, with no credit card. If you'd like a hand setting up, ask, and we'll do it with you.

Questions people also ask

What are the steps in the bakery production process?

Plan, scale, mix, bulk ferment, divide and preshape, shape, proof, bake, cool and pack. For bread, the steps often run across two days, with an overnight proof in the cold.

How does a small bakery plan production?

From orders and what usually sells, less what's on hand, then backward from when the bread is due, with the oven's capacity as the limit.

Why do bakeries proof dough overnight?

A cold overnight proof slows the dough, so the mixing and shaping happen the afternoon before and the bake can start early in the morning; it changes the flavor too.

What records should a bakery keep for production?

Each ingredient's lot at scaling, and at packing the good units, a batch code and a best-by date. Process notes like dough temperature are worth keeping too.