Cybake celebrates twenty-five years of happy bakers
Cybake bakery software is now 25 years old. What a great journey!
When I founded the company in 1998, I brought a PC-based bakery management app that I had developed with me that was used by less than a handful of commercial craft bakers.
In June 1998, RedBlack Software (as we were formerly known) shipped our first copies of what was now called Cybake to new customers. Slowly but surely, its popularity amongst British and then Irish bakeries rose over the years.
By 2016, the company had reached a crossroads. Cybake had now been through three versions, we had many happy users, and a fair number of those were large companies.
By this time, we had adopted a hybrid on-premises/cloud development model, become well-versed in forecasting with machine learning, and were conducting UK government-backed research into AI in the baking sector.
From all of this, it became abundantly clear that the only way to future-proof our solutions and keep serving our users in the future was to start all over again and rebuild Cybake from the ground up, but this time for the cloud.
So, we did. Two years later, in 2018, we were armed with a brand-new cloud version of Cybake, new investment, and a new chairman in the form of successful business software veteran Sandy Scott.
Since then, it has been a bit like being a start-up all over again, and a disruptive one at that.
Jump to the cloud
For example, none of the other British bakery software vendors that we considered to be competitors chose to make the same jump to the cloud. They preferred, presumably, to let the clock wind gently down on their on-premises systems as they headed for an eventual, but certain, sunset.
Plus, after a long running saga, we finally gained the right to live at cybake.com, as opposed to our previous cybake.co.uk domain.
So, as well as finding ourselves in a unique place as the only 100% bakery-focused cloud developers in the UK, we quickly found ourselves answering enquiries from all over the world.
Hence, in late 2020, and despite the pandemic, we opened for business in the USA and were bowled over by the warm response Cybake received. In early 2022, we followed suit in Australia with similar results. Right now, we are expanding our teams in both countries and are set to announce the availability of Cybake in new territories very soon.
The result of this whirlwind of activity over the last five years is that we more than doubled our customer base. Over three hundred bakeries now rely on Cybake to manage their business operations.
So, if you are reading this and you are a Cybake user, a massive thank you. Without our customers’ faith, investment, and enthusiasm over the past 25 years, none of this would be possible. Our biggest wish is that Cybake continues to repay that faith for many decades to come.
Jane Tyler is the managing director of Cybake and was the bakery software’s original creator. She is a regular speaker at food and technology conferences and is also known for championing the cause of food waste reduction.
