Pane Fresco
Great Plains Beef is a specialist provider of certified Piedmontese beef based in Nebraska’s state capital, Lincoln. It also operates a top-rated restaurant, Casa Bovina, a retail butcher, The Mercato, and a thriving wholesale bakery, Pane Fresco.
Head baker Peter Bass, whose resume includes working as Chef de Partie at the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group’s Bouchon Bakery in California, takes up the story.
“I’ve been a part of it since April last year [2021], which is when we got started,” he says.
“We had about a thousand-foot square space that I was able to build out on and we finished construction sometime around January this year. We are quite new, but I understand the importance of having a bit of software to speed up a lot of the processes that go on in the background of a bakery.”
Just like the beef produced by the bakery’s parent company, Peter’s goal is to sell his bread to affiliated grocery store partners in addition to his current wholesale customers. To do this, he has had to navigate FDA (Food & Drug Administration) allergen and nutritional information laws, which he is now doing with the aid of Cybake’s technical module.
“We’re going to have to have our nutritional information in there, and that’s a huge amount of information going into Cybake,” he says.
“Just inputting recipes; that was far easier than looking up the nutritional information for the 200 or 300 different items that are used in a bakery. For every single chocolate, flour, dried fruit and so on, there’s a lot of different stuff that adds up to lots of different products for the nutritional side.
“But once it’s in there, Cybake does all the math for you. It figures it all out and puts a nice nutritional label on everything, so that when you send products to the grocery stores, they have the nutritional label on there like they’re supposed to.”
Peter is confident that Cybake bakery management software will help his wholesale bakery to grow.
He says: “I think we could scale to outgrow the production space on the administrative side, because once you have a new customer in Cybake and they are pretty comfortable with using the customer portal, then that administrative stuff is almost done.
“We only have a thousand square foot building we’re working out of. It’s a decent size but, in the future, I figure that we might be outgrowing it in the next three-to-five years if we continue to grow at the rate that we’re expecting.”
Recipe management
Before subscribing to Cybake, the bakery used a complex Excel spreadsheet to manage its operations that Peter describes as having the potential to go wrong. Cybake’s recipe management system, however, is more accurate at calculating recipe sizes, leading to less waste.
Peter also credits his Cybake online ordering portal for helping to manage his bakery’s orders.
“That’s another great aspect with Cybake,” he explains. “Once you have set what a customer can order, that’s all they can order. And the times they order. That was the biggest problem before. I’ve had customer call up the day before for a product that takes two-to-three days to make.”
Another benefit is that Cybake helps him focus on art of baking.
Perter says: “While I am capable of dealing with that administrative stuff, I am not fond of it. I’d rather be in the bakery working with bread.
“It’s a lot easier to fix problems when you’re in the bakery as they’re happening rather than dealing with than after it’s already happened. So, if I see things going wrong in the bakery, I can make changes then and there to make sure the final product and consistency is where we want it to be, instead of having to see it at the very end and realize: ‘Ah, I should have been here making sure things were going right.’”
Asked if he would recommend Cybake to other wholesale bakers, Peter says: “Yes, one hundred percent. I would recommend Cybake to minimize admin cost so much. It looks good to the customer, it works perfectly. I found the set-up process to be quite easy. It didn’t take too much time, there’s was a lot of information that has been put into the system.”
“Once it’s in there, Cybake does all the math for you. It figures it all out and puts a nice nutritional label on everything…”
Chris James is a communications specialist for Cybake and Cybake USA.
