Plan each bake from standing orders and keep every flour lot and allergen changeover on record.

A bakery factory has the shortest planning cycle in food manufacturing. Orders close in the evening, dough is mixed overnight, and loaves, buns or cakes are on a delivery van before the shops open. There is no second chance to get the count right, because a loaf that is not on the van at dawn is a loaf that is never sold.

The paperwork rarely keeps up. Standing orders sit in a notebook at the dispatch desk. Flour lots are written on a mixing sheet. The allergen changeover between a nut cake and a plain sponge is remembered by the line supervisor. When a retailer returns trays of unsold bread or asks which flour went into Tuesday’s batch, the answer is pieced together by hand from three places.

Outlet orders and standing orders are totalled by product, tray size and delivery route. The planner turns them into dough batches for each mixer, allowing for proofing time, oven slots and the cooling rack space available. Flour, yeast, fat, sugar and improvers are weighed to the recipe, and each lot used is noted on the batch sheet. Slicing and wrapping follow, with a best-before date and a lot code printed on every pack. The first wrapped tray of each run is held back until the line lead has read the date on it and signed.

Dispatch loads trays and crates by van route. It is a tight hour. Drivers collect empties and unsold returns, which are counted and credited at the outlet. Between lines, the supervisor cleans down and signs an allergen changeover before a product with nuts, egg or sesame gives way to one without. The next morning, the planner reads yesterday’s returns before setting today’s batches.