Franco Baking Company improves productivity, purchasing and waste with Cybake
Franco Baking Company is a sourdough bread specialist with a fifty-year heritage based in in Sparks, Nevada.
The bakery supplies restaurants and grocery stores on a wholesale basis across northern Nevada and Lake Tahoe. It also has a frozen bread line that is distributed throughout the USA.
In 2023, another local firm, Roundabout Catering, acquired the company. After seeing a need for new technology to run the bakery, new owners MaryBeth and Colin Smith (pictured, left) installed Cybake.
Explaining how the company uses the software to organize its operations, director Beth McBride (pictured, right, with husband Grant) says: “We input the daily orders into Cybake, and it helps us create production sheets to know exactly what to bake, with the recipes, because we have over a hundred products.
“It organizes it down to the dough type, in large scale, and further breaks it down throughout the process in our bakery. It would be impossible to do what we do without Cybake. We use it every day in our bakery and it’s the lifeline of what the production team uses.”
Beth points to improvements in waste, productivity and consistency from using the software.
She says: “The way Cybake has set up the bake sheets; it has the exact recipe right there on each sheet, so the bakers don’t have to double-check a book for the recipe. It tells them exactly how many batches to make.”
This, in turn, leaves time for weighing products, tweaking things, and refining the process further.
“It’s continuing to save us in wasted dough, under-bake and over-bake,” she explains.
“What’s also nice is the information you can get right away – the nutritionals, the ingredients lists and the allergens. All of that is really easy to use and it definitely helps you take off running with a new product – you already, right away, know all the information without having to research it.”
Franco Baking Company uses Cybake’s purchasing module to keep stock of ingredients. uses.
“I’d really recommend it,” says Beth. “You can send out purchase orders out to your vendors and really get a dialed-in idea of where costs are changing and what items you need to stock up on.”
Integration
The business also integrates Cybake with its other apps, finding it easy, for example, to share data with the delivery software it uses.
“It’s really quick, the team does all their orders in their tablets and when they are back for the day, we can quickly upload It into Cybake, and then it’s all organized by their routes.”
Before adopting Cybake, the business was using a legacy bakery management program running on a DOS-based PC.
The program only worked on one computer and one terminal. This meant that any tasks on it had to always be conducted on site. Unlike with modern, cloud-based software, there was no option to work remotely.
“It was very old,” says Beth. “We were babying the computer, praying that it didn’t break. Only a handful of people knew how to operate it and it was a big issue, especially with getting printer compatibility.
“Ever since we’ve been on Cybake, I’m able to help them run bakery reports even when I’m off site on the weekends if someone’s having a problem. It’s a lot more user friendly.”
With a recent change in ownership, there were some worries about how staff might take to new software after using the previous system for decades.
However, says Beth, they took to it well: “They were really flexible with helping us figure the bake-off percentages and working on dialing things in. So, it wasn’t like the first day we switched over, everything was a mess. Our staff really got on board and were excited about having something that would give them more information and make their job easier.”
So, would Can Franco Baking Company recommend Cybake to other bakeries?
“Yes, definitely, I would,” says Beth. “I would say the reason why is because when I was interviewing companies for this technology, the sales team and the support team were so awesome.
“Kelly is amazing, she knows the product really well. They were just great at adapting the system to our needs, rather than being like: ‘Nope, we do it this way with Cybake’, listening to our needs and what was going to work for us – and helping create ways to make it work.”
Thinking of making the move to a modern, cloud-based bakery ERP system to streamline your business operations? Get in touch for a chat.
Seamus Quinn is the head of communications for Cybake, Cybake USA and Cybake Australia.
