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How to Calculate Your Baking Capacity for Markets and Pre-Orders | Episode 45

  • Dec 19, 2024
  • 6 min read

Updated: 3 days ago

Listen on Apple Podcasts or watch on YouTube


My baking assistant Melissa was about to take her very first holiday pre-orders, and she asked me the question every microbakery owner eventually asks. How do you know where to cap it?


It is a really good question, and the answer is not a feeling. It is a number you can calculate from the equipment you own and the hours you actually have. Once you have it, you stop opening pre-orders and hoping, and you start opening them knowing exactly what you can deliver.


Here is the whole process I use, for markets and for pre-orders both.


Start with the hours you cannot move

Before you count a single loaf, write down the commitments in your week that are immovable. School drop-off and pickup, appointments, church, meetings, your sit-down family dinner. Whatever cannot be rescheduled.


Those go on the schedule first and everything else works around them. Most overcommitting starts right here, with a bake plan built for a week that does not exist.


Count your real equipment limits

This is the part that turns capacity into a hard number. Walk through your kitchen and write down what each piece of equipment actually holds.


Here are mine, so you can see how specific to get:

  • Oven. I open bake sixteen batards in one round, eight per oven across my double oven. So I offer batards in multiples of sixteen and never one loaf over, because seventeen means a whole extra round, extra time, and extra energy.

  • Loaf pans. I can bake twenty four sandwich loaves in a round and I own exactly twenty four loaf pans. Twenty four is my cap for markets and pre-orders, and I do not plan to buy more.

  • Focaccia. Sixteen in a round, so sixteen is the cap.

  • Fridge. I max out around eighty loaves in bannetons, with room for about thirty more in our second fridge if I am desperate.

  • Mixer. Twenty four loaves at a time. My sandwich loaves and batards are all nine hundred grams, so that math is easy to repeat.

  • Bins. Eight large bins, twelve loaves of dough in each, so ninety six loaves of dough is my hard stop.

  • Baking sheets. For a long time I had exactly two, which meant cookies and scones took round after round in the oven.

Your numbers will be completely different and that is fine. What matters is that you know them.


Two things fall out of this list right away. Your smallest number is your real limit, no matter how big the others are. And when one item keeps bottlenecking your whole bake, like cookies on two trays, that is your signal that it is time to buy more trays. Let the equipment purchase be the answer to a bottleneck you measured, not a wish. I talk through how to make that call in Investing in Equipment. Is it Time to Level Up Your Microbakery?.


Know your rate per hour

Equipment tells you how much you can hold. Your rate tells you how long it takes.


Right now I bake about twenty loaves an hour. When I started with three Dutch ovens, my rate was four loaves an hour. I still have the notebook where I planned one of my first markets: sixteen loaves in Dutch ovens at four an hour was four hours, and twenty four loaves in loaf pans at eight per round was three hours. Seven hours of baking on the Friday before market, written down before I ever mixed the dough.


Do the same for everything you sell. Loaves per hour, cookies per hour, scones per hour. Include the fiddly parts, the scoring, pulling bannetons out of the fridge, cutting parchment.


Then time your packaging, because that is the number most bakers have never measured. It takes me about twenty seconds to bag, seal, and sticker a loaf. If it is taking you two minutes, that is one hour to package thirty loaves, and you just found an hour of your life. One change that made a big difference for me was going from several stickers down to one label with all the information on it.


Add a buffer, then add more

Once you have your times, add at least twenty five percent on top. My business coach would tell you to add fifty percent, and she is usually right, because nothing goes as fast as we think it will.


If you think packaging takes an hour, give yourself an hour and a half. Something always comes up. You will remember you never designed the new label in Canva, or a glass of milk will hit the floor. Buffer time is what keeps a busy day from becoming a stressful one.


Reverse engineer the day backward from your deadline

Now put it together by working backward from the moment the bread has to be ready.


Here is a real market Saturday for me. The market opens at nine, so I leave the house at eight, which means the car is loaded by seven thirty. To do that, the cookies have to be packaged by six thirty, which means they come out of the oven around six with a fan on them to cool, which means they go in at five thirty.


The bake day before looks the same in reverse. I want everything packaged by eight in the evening, and packaging takes about two hours, so I start at six. Everything needs four hours to cool, so it is out of the oven by two. If the bake takes five hours, I start at nine in the morning and the oven goes on at eight thirty.


Sleep is my number one priority and I am not willing to stay up half the night, so the whole schedule gets built to protect a normal bedtime. Yours should protect whatever you are unwilling to give up.


Then keep going backward into dough day and prep day. How long does mixing take, by hand or in the mixer, plus stretch and folds for every bin? What can be done days ahead?


Small tweaks that give you control over the clock

When the schedule and the dough do not line up, you have levers.

  • Cooler water slows your bulk fermentation and warmer water speeds it up. Less starter slows it, more starter speeds it up. Change one thing at a time, in small amounts, after you know how the recipe behaves normally.

  • If a bin is going too fast, get it into the fridge and leave the lid off for a bit so it cools down, then shape the next day when you have more time.

  • Pre-measure your dry ingredients earlier in the week. It takes almost no time and it can happen while the kids eat breakfast.

  • Bulk up your starter a couple of days ahead with a good big feed so it is ready for dough day.

  • Prep cookies and scones early in the week when you have margin, and hold them in the fridge or freezer instead of scrambling on bake day.


If you are a year or two in, audit this

Run this calculation once a quarter, because your limits change and your menu changes with them.


Watch what happens in the first hour or two after your pre-orders open. When one flavor is selling much faster than another, I lower the quantity on the slower option and add a couple to the one people want. Same total, better sell-through, and no leftover loaves.


Then look for the item that eats your bake day. If a product takes a round of the oven you cannot spare and it is not carrying its weight in revenue, that is a menu decision, not a scheduling one. I walk through how to make it in When to Remove a Product from Your Microbakery Menu. And if the oven itself is your bottleneck, there are more ideas in Baking More in a Home Oven, Growing Your Customer Base, and Saving Time.


Final thoughts

The point of all this is not to hit my numbers. Please do not compare your kitchen to mine, or to anyone you watch on Instagram. Comparison is not going to help you bake one more loaf.


If your capacity is twelve loaves, that is perfect. Use the same principles: know your equipment limits, know your rate, build in a buffer, and work backward from the deadline. Twelve loaves that come out calm and on time will build you a better business than thirty that nearly break you.


Set the number, offer that many, and go have a good bake day!


Cheering you on,


Caroline


Keep going

If this one was useful, these three go deeper on the same problem.


Links to things you might like!


 
 
 

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