Production Schedule Example for a Small Bakery or Kitchen

A production schedule is a grid: products down the side, days across the top, and in each box how many you'll make. You fill it in backward. Start from what has to be delivered or sold each day, step back by how long each product takes to make, check that the total fits your oven and your hands, and then read off the ingredients you need to buy. Below is a full week for a small bakery, with the constraint it uncovers and what to do about it.

The short version

1. Write down demand by day: standing orders, the shop, the market.
2. For each product, note how long it takes from start to sellable, and how long it stays sellable.
3. Work backward from each delivery to a make day.
4. Add up each day's load against your real capacity: oven loads, mixer batches, hours of hands.
5. Move what can move. Long-shelf-life products go on slow days.
6. Turn the week's quantities into an ingredient list, and compare it with what's on the shelf.
7. Afterward, write what actually happened next to the plan.

The bakery

Three products, which is enough to show every idea.

And the demand:

• The shop sells about 20 loaves a day, Monday to Saturday.
• A café takes 30 loaves every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, delivered by 7 a.m.
• The Saturday farmers market sells about 80 loaves.
• Cookies: 96 a day through the shop, plus 240 for the market.
• Granola: about 28 bags a week across everything.

Step 1: Demand by day

Already the week has a shape. Saturday is six and a half times a Monday.

Step 2: Back off by lead time

Bread is a two-day product, so every bake day needs a mix day before it.

This row is the one that gets forgotten. Saturday's 130 loaves are really a Friday problem: that's 130 loaves mixed, shaped and into the cold room on Friday afternoon, on top of Friday's own baking. It also means somebody mixes on Sunday, or Monday's shop bread comes from Saturday's bake and is two days old. Decide that one on purpose.

Step 3: Check capacity

One deck oven, 24 loaves a load, 45 minutes.

Saturday needs six loads, four and a half hours of oven, and the café wants its 30 loaves by 7 a.m. and the market opens at 8. Counting backward, with cooling and packing, the first load goes in around 1:30 a.m.

That's the constraint, and you found it on paper on a Monday, not at 5 a.m. on Saturday with a line forming. The options are the usual ones. Start earlier. Bake the café's 30 last thing Friday night (it's one day old at delivery, inside the two-day window, and the café may or may not accept that, so ask). Cap the market at what the oven can do. Or decide that the market is now big enough to justify a second oven, which is a decision this table just made a lot easier to defend.

Do the same check for the cold room (does it hold 130 shaped loaves on Friday night?) and for hands (who's shaping 130 loaves on Friday afternoon?).

Step 4: Put the flexible things on slow days

Granola lasts 60 days. It has no business being made on a Friday. One 10 kg batch on Monday, the quietest day, covers the week.

Cookie dough keeps five days chilled. Mix it Monday and Thursday, and bake off each morning. Two mixing sessions replace six.

Cookie batches: Monday to Wednesday needs 288 cookies, which is 6 batches of 48. Thursday to Saturday needs 528, which is 11. That second number is a lot of dough for one session, so you might split it Thursday and Friday. The schedule's job is to show you that on Monday.

This grid is the production schedule. Print it, put it on the wall, and let people cross things off. There's a bakery-specific version, with a daily bake sheet, in bakery production planning.

Step 5: Read off the ingredients

The week needs 290 loaves at 500 g of flour each: 145 kg of bread flour. A 50 lb bag is 22.68 kg, so that's 6.4 bags. You're ordering 7, minus whatever's on the shelf, and it needs to be in the building by Sunday's mix.

(The list of what goes into each product is called a bill of materials, if software ever asks you for one.) Do that for every ingredient and you've got a purchasing list that comes from the plan, which beats ordering "the usual" and hoping. It ties straight into knowing when to reorder each item.

Step 6: Write down what happened

Next to each planned number, leave a box for the actual. Took 80 loaves to the market, sold 66, 14 came home. Three weeks of that and you'll know whether it's really an 80-loaf market or a 65-loaf market in the rain. The best forecast for next Saturday is the last four Saturdays, adjusted for anything you know (a holiday, a competing event, a forecast of storms). Aim to sell out in the last hour. Selling out at ten means you left money on the table, and hauling home a third of what you brought means you baked your profit and then carried it.

Where this stops working

This works well for one site and a stable week. It gets hard when the café changes its order on Thursday night and you have to work out by hand what that does to Friday's mix, the flour order and the cold room. It gets harder with a second kitchen, a co-packer who only runs Wednesdays, or a customer who'll only accept product with a certain number of days left on it. Every one of those is a dependency, and a grid on the wall doesn't recalculate.

How TaroStack does it

TaroStack's planning does this backward walk for you, continuously. It takes your orders, your forecast and what's on the shelf, and works out what to make, what to buy and what to move between sites, and when, using your recipes, your suppliers' lead times and each site's working days. It knows shelf life, so it won't suggest baking Saturday's bread on Thursday, and it will flag a batch that would be too old for a customer who needs fresh. Problems show up in plain words ("Friday's bake is over oven capacity"), not as a wall of numbers. You get a weekly schedule per site, and every suggestion is a draft that you approve, change or ignore.

Planning is part of the Standard plan at $99 a month.

Questions people also ask

What is a production schedule?

A plan of what will be made, how much, and when, usually by day for the coming week. It turns orders and forecasts into a to-do list for the kitchen and a shopping list for purchasing.

How do you prepare a production plan?

List demand by day, step each product back by its lead time to find the make day, check the daily totals against the capacity of your equipment and people, shift long-shelf-life items to slow days, then calculate the ingredients the plan needs. There's a longer walkthrough here.

How much should I bake for a farmers market?

Average what you sold at the last four markets, then adjust for weather, season and anything unusual. If you've been selling out early, go up 10 to 15% and see what happens. Track what comes home every week. After a month you'll have a better forecast than any rule of thumb.

What's the difference between a production schedule and a production plan?

People use them interchangeably. When there is a difference, the plan is the bigger picture (what to make this month and what that needs) and the schedule is the detail (which batch, which day, which oven).