Breadwinner Bakery uses Cybake for orders, recipes and purchasing
The Breadwinner Bakery has been part of Edinburgh’s baking scene since opening in Bruntsfield in 1973.
Originally launched as the city’s first open-plan bakery, the business built its reputation on artisan baking, traditional methods and quality ingredients. Around 14 years ago, the bakery moved to South Gyle as the wholesale side of the business grew.
In 2020, The Breadwinner Bakery made the move to becoming fully vegan, focusing entirely on plant-based baking. Today, the bakery supplies cafés, shops and hospitality businesses across Edinburgh with a range of plant-based breads, pastries and sweet treats.
Arran Bathgate, Sales and Procurement Lead at The Breadwinner Bakery, has been part of the company’s journey for more than eight years.
Commenting on the bakery’s specialities he says: “One of our staple products is our cinnamon bun. So, I’d say that it is one of our high quality or most known products. Also, my personal favourite is our sourdough. Anything you can make with that is really good.”
As the wholesale side of the business grew, The Breadwinner Bakery needed a system that could handle orders, production, recipes and purchasing together. It decided to use Cybake across all these areas to help manage wholesale operations and production planning.
Orders
With wholesale production running every day, the team needed a clear way to manage customer orders and production planning so everything could stay organised from order intake through to dispatch.
Explaining how this works with Cybake, Arran says: “The main part is the ordering section. As a business, of course, we need to take orders in from customers. We need to put them into the system and log them.”
“Once all the orders are put in the system, we can generate reports so we can lead production, so they know what to make. We have a part of the ordering section called adjustments. So, if any orders go wrong, we can essentially credit the order before it gets processed.”
The bakery also uses Cybake to manage recipes, ingredient pricing, and supplier information together in one system. This helps the team keep track of recipe costs, organise purchasing and manage supplier orders more efficiently
“We have to create recipes for all our products, and this also has a margin maker which allows us to cost up the recipe that was built into it as well.”
“We can put the prices in, we can put our suppliers in, so it covers all bases for having what we need in the bakery. We can also produce purchase orders for our suppliers, so we can match off any incoming deliveries.”
“Cybake is cloud-based, so you just log online and it’s sitting there. Just having it online means the risk of it going down is a lot less.”
Transition
Although changing systems took some getting used to, Arran says the transition was straightforward because the information itself stayed familiar to the team.
“A lot of the packing sheets and stuff we used to use before, they looked different, but the information was the same. It’s just trying to teach people where to look to find that information, as opposed to the position they looked before.”
Arran explains that the support from the Cybake team and the flexibility of the system have been important for the bakery as the business has grown. Being able to access the system from anywhere has also made a big difference.
“Yes, I would recommend Cybake to other bakeries from all the stuff I’ve mentioned,” he concludes. “It’s a pretty easy system to use. You could train anybody up on it.”
Catherine Thomas is the digital marketing executive at Cybake.
