Cooplands Bakery
Cooplands Bakery was founded in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, in 1885 and is the second largest retail bakery chain in the United Kingdom.
It operates two production bakeries, 156 shops and a fleet of sandwich delivery vans across Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, and the North East.
Cooplands Bakery started using Cybake bakery management software in 2020, primarily to automate the replenishment of stock in each of its retail outlets. In 2023, it installed Cybake ISB retail production planning software to control in-store sandwich production across its entire retail estate.
Cybake analyses the sales and stock data in Cooplands Bakery’s outlets and calculates what goods need to be made and delivered to which shops each day. Using Cybake on tablets, store staff are thus helped to optimize sales and reduce waste. Deliveries, returns and transfers are all captured on their devices, also reducing paperwork.
Cooplands Bakery’s central operations manager Carole Hay explains: “Previously, it was pen and paper. We’d go into shops and a manager would have forecasted an order based on last week’s sales. So, we would have 156 managers producing a forecasted order. Then you might have an area manager that disagreed, so they would go in and change it. Then you might get a regional manager that went in and disagreed again and changed it again.
“Now, Cybake has centralized orders and we encourage area managers really not to touch the system. They can do amends as and when, but they are encouraged not to. So centrally, we manage the orders. We have far more control in that sense.”
Cybake has allowed the team to analyse and improve stock at their shops in coastal holiday towns like Scarborough, Skegness and Filey in line with the wide seasonal fluctuations that they experience.
Confidence in using the system has also grown which has sped up data-driven decision-making.
Carole says: “We’ve got a promotion on at the moment on our Scotch rolls, which means we can add an uplift and then generate the order straight away. So, we can react quite quickly. Previously, we were waiting a week and doing things a week in advance. Whereas now, we’re not scared to press that ‘generate’ button. We can just do it and know that we’re going to get the result we want.
“What we are doing now is far more advanced than where we were four or five years ago. I think we’re really efficient with the system. We can do quick fixes if we realize something is not quite right.”
Automated orders
Cooplands Bakery now plans to use Cybake to automate its shops’ orders from third parties to replenish sundries like cans of drinks and other items such as packaging materials.
“If it’s not already in Cybake, we’re looking at moving it into Cybake,” says Carole. “We couldn’t manage the business without it now.”
Cybake ISB is an entirely separate product from the Cybake bakery management software system.
Originally developed for supermarkets and convenience stores, Cybake ISB is a retail production planning system that improves availability, increases sales and cuts waste for in-store bakeries and fresh food counters.
Using advanced forecasting, Cybake ISB tells store staff the best combination of fresh food products to make at the right times via tablets. At the same time, Cybake ISB shows head office exactly how production, sales and waste are going across its stores, with key KPIs.
Sandwiches make up somewhere approaching 30% of Cooplands Bakery’s sales. However, before the adoption of Cybake ISB, head office had little control over what or how many sandwiches each store made.
To see whether Cybake ISB could improve the availability of the sandwiches that customers wanted at the right times of the day, the company initially ran a small-scale trail of Cybake ISB.
Carole says: “We did it against five control shops to get some analysis and it increased the sales of the store overall. It increased the sales of the pre-made sandwiches.”
Cooplands has now rolled the system out across all of its shops, giving head office a clear view of exactly what should be made and whether each shop is complying.
Efficiency
While emphasizing that the service aspect of made-to-order sandwiches is still important to attract customers, Carole says: “Efficiency wise, it’s a lot better because we can have those sandwiches pre-made in the morning before the lunchtime rush.
“The production plan has helped. It’s helped with compliance. It has helped with waste, but it’s also helped with availability, and it is something we will continue with. And we are going to investigate using Cybake ISB for our savories later in the year.”
Cybake ISB has also helped Cooplands better manage demand according to local tastes.
“We have regional sandwiches,” Carole explains, citing a pease pudding stottie (mushed yellow split peas on a flat round loaf) as an example of a popular choice for Cooplands Bakery customers in Sunderland.
“That just wouldn’t sell in Lincolnshire,” she says. “They don’t know what it is. We’re really quite clever now with the sandwich plan, we’ve got templates for everything. So, it has allowed us to have control over that regional side as well, whereas previously we didn’t.”
Carole is very positive about the help she and her colleagues get from Cybake’s implementations and customer services team. She says that their specialist bakery knowledge is a big plus and that their involvement can be crucial when initiating new ideas:
“They’re at the end of the phone and if they can’t think of a solution there and then, we kind of debate it through. They go away and then they put a Teams call in, and we’ll come back together and get the solution that we need.”
