KANSAS CITY, MO — When it comes to mitigating issues and keeping production running, retail bakers take their own approach when planning for and working around challenges.
From New Year’s Eve to Christmas with other holidays scattered in between — as well as pop culture occasions and sporting events— retail bakers face multiple occasions that require solid processes. As a result, they establish best practices to fit their businesses when times get busy.
Bake-by-numbers
Using past sales data, for example, can serve as a guide for planning the amount of labor needed, ingredient ordering and more.
“We’re constantly reviewing last year’s sales, and then even more recent history,” explained Kathleen Cussen, COO of Dolce Bakery in Prairie Village, KS, about how the bakery uses year-over-year data to plan. “In the last month, has business increased over what we did last year?”
In working with those past numbers, the Dolce team is then able to adjust projections for the current year and ensure that all the necessary ingredients, packaging and items essential are available for operations to continue.
Similarly, Rebecca Miller, CEO of Peggy Jean’s Pies in Columbia, MO, uses past sales figures to shape ingredient orders and narrow down menu offerings to 12 of the most popular flavors during the bakery’s biggest holiday of the year, Thanksgiving.
To prepare for such a big undertaking, the bakery has a pre-order window for customers in the weeks ahead of the actual holiday. Rebecca’s husband Jason, COO and CFO of Peggy Jean’s, calculates everything they’ll need well in advance such as pie tins and pumpkin cans.
All experienced hands on deck
Anticipating the baked goods that need to be made isn’t the only area where bakers have to prepare. While labor remains an issue for bakers, adding new hires into the mix isn’t always the ideal situation for getting through busier seasons.
Kathleen shared that while seasonal staffers such as high school and college students may be given more hours than normal, new hires aren’t usually brought in to support the bakery’s operations during busier times of the year.
“It’s rare that we would bring on somebody brand new, it’s just too much of a learning curve,” Kathleen said. “When we’re in that mode, that’s a little much to be monitoring someone who is brand new.”
With a mix of hourly and salaried team members, the Dolce team tries to work ahead as much as possible to ensure that there is balance in team member’s overtime.
“We have a combination of salaried folks and hourly, so as a small business, overtime is something that we obviously monitor very closely, but it’s going to happen,” Kathleen said. “When we realize it’s going to happen, we try to keep each individual from having too much in one week.”
This balance comes by setting a cap on how many overtime hours hourly employees can have per week and adjusting off days later for salaried employees who put in the extra time during the busier days.
Kathleen shared that certain occasions require a higher amount of certain baked goods, such as additional cookies around Halloween and pies at Thanksgiving, with an all-around spike near the Christmas holiday. With this in mind, the bakery has a system for getting baked goods out of the bakery and into the hands of their customers.
“There’s a production board where we know exactly what we’re doing every single day, there are rarely surprises,” Kathleen said. “We work ahead as much as possible before each holiday and then when it’s time to get everything out and baked and finished that’s when the uptick in hour of payroll occurs.”
However, Dolce’s bakery leaders and members of management are ready to jump in at a moment’s notice when the going gets tough.
Rebecca also doesn’t bring in anyone new during the busy season due to the from-scratch practice of the bakery. As a result, the team at Peggy Jean’s works long hours, with Rebecca and her family bearing the brunt of those longer days. With Jason at one location and Rebecca at the other, the pair works together to communicate each location’s needs.
“If somebody is struggling at one store and one is doing well, we might send somebody back and forth,” she said.
Keep calm and bake on
In stressful situations, keeping cool is key for Rebecca, and a lesson she’s had to learn over the years. Rebecca shared that early in the bakery’s journey, especially in the COVID years, she handled crisis much differently than she does now.
“I used to be a really reactionary person, I would just cry a lot,” she shared. “And now [the staff] joke they’re like, ‘You never cry anymore,’ and I just try to tell myself that it’s okay, whatever it is, short of death or the store burning to the ground, I’ve been through worse.”
With two pie shops in operation, her best practice is to stay calm and ensure her team is focused on the task at hand.
“Somebody that’s the captain of the ship has got to be like, ‘It’s okay,’” she said. “If they’re all running around panicking and you want to jump right in the middle of the panic, nothing gets done.”
As a way to remember to lead with a level head, Rebecca’s daughter reminds her to take a note in remaining calm from an unlikely source: Nick Saban, head coach of the University of Alabama football team.
“My daughter will text me and be like, ‘What would Nick Saban do?’ in which case I would say, ‘Nick Saban would not cry, he would look at these people in line and say that it would be okay,’” Rebecca said.
For unexpected issues such as climate conditions and power outages, bakers have to stay on their toes and be resourceful. When Dolce experienced a power outage earlier this year, Kathleen shared that the team reached out to their neighbors and asked to use some refrigerator space to store orders that needed to be picked up.
“We had a team of people finishing a few things and taking them over and then someone at the door to guide people even though we’d sent out messages and made phone calls,” Kathleen recalled. “That’s a perfect example of an ‘on-the-fly’ decision because otherwise, the option would’ve been to try and figure out where people live to make deliveries or issue refunds.”
While some conflicts can be resolved by altering operating hours to keep employees from traveling to the bakery in unsafe conditions, flexibility for working through challenges is a must.
“The number one thing that we’ve learned is to be flexible,” Kathleen said, “You can have the perfect plan and there will always be things that will be out of your control that will challenge you. If you keep that mindset, you’ll be able to think more clearly.”
