An ordering app for a six-shop bakery chain

Fernwood Bakery Co. bakes for six of its own shops and about forty cafés across the region. Until last spring, every one of those orders arrived by phone, email or a shared spreadsheet, and someone retyped it into a production sheet at 9pm.

The problem

The bakery had outgrown its process, not its ovens. Orders came in five different ways, each with its own cut-off time and its own way of going wrong. Head baker Tom started each shift by ringing cafés to check what they actually meant.

What it cost them, in their own words:

• Two or three wrong orders a day, usually found when the van was already loaded
• A production sheet that only one person knew how to build
• No record of what a café ordered last month, so no easy way to suggest a repeat
• Shop managers ordering by text message after the cut-off, then wondering why the bread was short

What we shipped

We spent the first week in the bakery, not in a meeting room. By Friday we had a one-page plan: café ordering first, shop ordering second, everything else later.

The first release went live in week two with just three cafés. It let them pick from the real product list, see the cut-off clock, and repeat last week’s order in one tap. Each Friday after that, a new release went out:

1. Café ordering with a hard cut-off and a clear confirmation email
2. A production sheet built automatically at 8pm, grouped by dough and oven
3. Shop ordering for the six Fernwood locations, with par levels per weekday
4. A delivery list sorted by van route, printable on the old office printer
5. Simple invoicing exports for the bookkeeper

The app runs on a small dedicated server registered to Fernwood, with nightly backups and a restore we test every month.

How it went

All forty cafés were ordering through the app by week six. Nobody was forced to switch. The old phone line stayed open, but it went quiet on its own once cafés saw their order history waiting for them.

The biggest change was at 9pm. The production sheet now builds itself, and Tom checks it on his phone instead of writing it by hand. When an order looks odd, like ten times the usual sourdough, the app flags it before it reaches the oven.

What’s next

Fernwood is opening a seventh shop next year. We are adding a small stock view so each shop can mark what sold out early, which will feed straight into tomorrow’s par levels. The plan, as always, is one small release at a time.