Macrina Bakery cuts admin and moves to paperless production with ERP migration to Cybake
Macrina Bakery has been part of Seattle’s baking scene since 1993, when founder Leslie Mackie opened its first café in the city’s Belltown neighborhood.
Since then, the business has grown considerably. Today, Macrina Bakery operates seven cafés, employs around 320 people and serves more than 1,000 wholesale customers, supplying grocery stores, cafés, restaurants, hotels, hospitals and catering companies.
Its range has grown along with it. Breads, rustic loaves, pan loaves, pastries, cookies, coffee cakes, muffins and laminated products are all part of Macrina’s extensive line-up. Its brioche rolls are a particular favorite.
“If you get a hamburger in Seattle, it should be on one of our brioche rolls or brioche buns,” says Macrina Bakery president and co-owner Scott France.
Scott and his business partners became involved with Macrina in 2007 and have seen the bakery continue to grow “little by little, year in and year out.”
That growth, however, also put increasing pressure on the systems behind the bakery.
Growth
Macrina Bakery had been trying for years to move its production sheets out of Excel. The bakery was also using a huge amount of paper across production and deliveries, while its existing bakery software was struggling with the volume of transactions the business now handled.
“We started looking for a new bakery management system when we had to back up our previous system on a daily basis,” Scott explains.
“The size that we had grown to was such that the previous system really couldn’t handle the volume of transactions that we were experiencing.”
Macrina needed something that could deal with the bakery as it operated today, but there was another consideration too. Whatever system it chose needed to be able to grow with the business.
The team had already looked at plenty of options.
“Over the years, we’ve used and looked at, maybe researched, many different bakery software programs. I would contend that we’ve looked at them all.”
Macrina Bakery began its transition to Cybake in 2025.
For Scott, choosing a system that was relatively new to the US market involved some trust. Macrina spoke with Cybake customers in the US and England before making its decision.
One of Scott’s biggest questions was whether Cybake could actually take Macrina’s production sheets out of Excel.
“The fact that we were able to get our production sheets out of Excel was something I was quite dubious about,” he says. “The fact that it was able to happen is a testament to the program’s viability.”
Paperless production
Moving production away from paper has changed the day-to-day workload for several teams at Macrina.
Previously, its customer service team was responsible for printing production sheets several times a day. If something changed, staff had to go onto the production floor and manually amend them.
That process has now largely disappeared.
“The fact that they don’t have to print production sheets multiple times a day, go out on the floor and hand-change production sheets, has been a tremendous time saving for our customer service folks,” says Scott.
There has been a change on the production floor too
Instead of paging through recipe books to find the correct recipe and work out the required batch for a particular product that day, production staff receive the information they need on tablets.
“The batch is going to come up on their tablet that coordinates with the right size of production for that particular product on that day.”
The obvious result is less paperwork, but Scott also sees a sustainability benefit.
“Certainly, we’re utilizing and throwing away less paper. So that, by itself, is an improvement from a sustainability practice.”
And Macrina Bakery is still implementing Cybake. Scott estimates that around 75% of the system was being used as part of phases one and two, with further options being considered for phase three.
Deliveries
Macrina’s drivers previously started their routes with multi-page printed route sheets containing their stops, delivery instructions and time requirements.
Since they have more than 1,000 wholesale customers across a range of businesses, keeping the delivery operation organized is an important part of Macrina’s day.
The bakery has now introduced cell phones for its drivers to use Cybake’s driver delivery app as part of their delivery process.
Routes can be set up in advance, with drivers following the sequence displayed on their device. Delivery information travels with them rather than sitting on a printed route sheet.
It has also given Macrina a better record of what happens when an order reaches the customer.
Drivers mark when they arrive and can take a photograph of the completed delivery, recording both the order and where it was left. That solves a very ordinary problem that can otherwise take time to investigate.
The bakery had seen proof of delivery become commonplace elsewhere and wanted the same visibility for its own customers.
“Sometimes our customers requested, ‘Hey, where did you leave that order?’ And now we have an opportunity to do that.
“You see Amazon drivers and other delivery folks doing this. We thought that we should be able to do it too.” says Scott.
Scott mentions how accessing data for reporting is now much faster and that publishing production information to the bakery floor is quicker. Setting up new customers involves less manual work, and wholesale customers using Cybake’s online ordering portal have a more intuitive way to manage their orders.
“I don’t have a great estimate of how many hours per day we’re saving, but I think over all of the production and office departments, we’re probably saving 40 hours a week at this point, with the expectation that that will increase over time.”
Diversity
Macrina Bakery has a diverse workforce, including many employees whose first language is Vietnamese, Spanish or Somali.
On the production floor, staff access Cybake through tablets using Chrome. This means instructions and descriptions can be automatically translated when somebody needs them in another language.
“One of our core values at Macrina is embracing diversity,” says Scott.
“One of the things that we love about Cybake and the tablets that we’re using on the production floor is that we can use Chrome to do an automatic translate of any instruction or description that the person utilizing the tablet doesn’t understand. It’s been really cool.”
It is a relatively simple part of the new way of working, but an important one in a bakery employing more than 300 people.
Macrina originally chose Cybake to solve problems inside the bakery, but one of the surprises has been the response from its wholesale customers.
“We thought that it would basically be on par with our previous software, but it actually has been more intuitive,” says Scott.
“We’ve had more folks signing up to do the online shop just because it works better.”
For a bakery serving more than 1,000 wholesale customers, making it easier for those customers to place and manage orders can make a significant difference on both sides.
Macrina Bakery is now using most areas of Cybake. Purchase ordering and ingredient tracking are among the areas it may look at next.
Scott sees potential for these tools to help Macrina better record inventory and purchases and improve traceability, particularly for its certified organic products.
Support
Introducing a new bakery management system across an operation of this size was never going to happen overnight.
Macrina planned its implementation in stages, with a team of six or seven people involved internally and Cybake working alongside them throughout the process.
Scott describes the onboarding as “really seamless”.
“The timeline that we set out with the Cybake team from the beginning has allowed staff to be properly trained as new parts of the system are introduced,” he explains.
That support has continued beyond onboarding.
Macrina Bakery operates 24 hours a day. On the few occasions when the bakery has experienced a system problem during the night, Scott says his team has still been able to reach somebody for help.
“Our folks at night were able to get hold of someone who was able to fix things, I think, within two hours, which is an amazing response time.
Scott also highlights the support Macrina has received throughout the process, particularly from Cybake’s Luke Karl, Martin Coyle and Kelly Tyson.
“We’ve worked with Luke and Martin, and primarily Kelly on a day-to-day basis or week-to-week basis, and they have all been really, really exceptional people,” he says.
“Cybake has been the one that has delivered on the promises made, and the implementation team and support since implementation have truly been second to none.”
“I would absolutely recommend Cybake to all other bakers.”
Want to find out how Cybake can help your bakery? Get in touch!
Catherine Thomas is the digital marketing executive at Cybake.
