How To Maintain Quality Control Across Multiple Bakeries

Having multiple bakery locations provides several advantages for your business. For one, it will bring additional revenue and attention to your baked goods. Many branches allow more people to purchase your products, bringing in new customers. Another benefit of having many bakery locations is meeting consumer demand. More stores mean more baked goods and increased access for customers in far-flung places.

While these all sound great, having many bakeries comes with a price. You’ll have to maintain consistency and quality amongst all your branches to provide the best products and services for your customers. Here’s how you can start: 

Implement a standard operating procedure

A standard operating procedure (SOP) is a set of instructions that dictate step-by-step procedures that must be followed in your bakery. These usually include terminologies, employee responsibilities, and regulatory requirements.

As a bakery, consider having recipes in your SOPs so all branches follow standard measurements and procedures. Also include employee rules and routines, such as their uniform and practises they must follow when working.

Once you have written or refined your bakery’s SOPs, ensure that all employees across locations are aware of these.

Regarding implementation, do so on the same day across all sites. This way, your bakery maintains quality standards and makes production costs roughly the same in each branch. Benefiting your customers, sales and helping to make your bakery business profitable.

Invest in similar equipment across locations

One tricky thing about having several branches filled with different employees is maintaining the quality of your products.

While you can train all your head bakers in the same manner, they will achieve varied results if they have different equipment. This is why you should ideally have the same baking equipment in each branch.

For example, if your recipes require a stand mixer to knead dough, try to get the same brand, model, and version for each of your locations.

Having a few branches knead the dough with spiral mixers while others use planetary mixers will change how the dough behaves and result in variations in your bread and pastries.

Maintain your equipment

One of the benefits of having more sites is that your maintenance costs should even out over the year. This makes it easier to budget for maintenance, and you should ensure that you set aside some of your yearly expense budget to cover maintenance and repair costs.

I suggest a budget of 5% of the value of your equipment is set aside each year. Conduct regular inspections and deep cleaning cycles to keep your equipment in good working order.

Use a central management system

A central management system allows you to manage operations across all branches from one location. One of the tasks you can supervise is inventory control.

You’ll be able to view each branch’s available stock and the ingredients they need to order. It also allows you to implement changes to your product range or menu in all branches should there be a need to do so.

Many will link to your credit card terminal to take payment from your customers too.

Overall, a central management system provides you with control over all your bakeries.

Keep your products the same

If you struggle to make consistent quality products, you should reduce your range and coach your bakers and bakery managers on how you want your bread to be made.

Although it’s boring to follow the same basic bread recipe again and again, if there are quality problems, it’s time to Keep Things Simple Stupid (KISS).

Share best practices across multiple sites and improve your bakery’s core products before expanding the range.

Ending thoughts

Maintaining product and service consistency when you have multiple bakery branches is a difficult task. With the help of technology such as integrated payments and the implementation of standard operating procedures, you’ll be giving your bakery business the best opportunity to grow and preserve quality across your locations.