top of page
Search

How to Find the Bottleneck Slowing Down Your Microbakery | Episode 123

  • Apr 9
  • 6 min read

Updated: 2 days ago

Listen on Apple Podcasts


You know the bake day I mean. It starts off fine, you are moving through your list, and then somewhere in the middle everything stops. You are waiting on the oven, waiting on a dough, waiting on yourself, and then you are sprinting to catch up until the first car pulls into the driveway.


At the end of a day like that you feel behind, even though you never once sat down.


That feeling is almost always a bottleneck. It is the one point in your process where everything piles up, and it makes the whole business feel harder than it should. More hours will not fix it, because you have already tried that and there are no more hours to give. What helps is finding the exact spot where your time is getting stuck.


The three places bottlenecks hide in a microbakery

After talking with a lot of bakers, and after living this in my own kitchen, I see bottlenecks show up in three places.


Production. This is anything in the actual baking that slows you down. Your dough is ready but you have no oven space. Shaping takes longer than you planned, so the next batch is overproofing while it waits on you. You have so many different products with so many different processes that you are switching tasks all morning instead of moving through one steady flow.


Production bottlenecks matter most because everything else in your day depends on them. When one step slows down, the whole day gets compressed, and that is when quality starts to slip because a dough sat too long or you rushed the part you normally do carefully.


Decision making. This one is less obvious and it costs more than most bakers expect. Everything is waiting on you to decide. What to bake, how much to bake, what to post, what to charge, what to offer next week, how to answer that message.


None of those decisions are hard on their own. Making them over and over, every single week, is what wears you down. This is where I see bakers with big menus, constantly adjusting and adding, wondering why everything feels heavy. Every fun new flavor is another decision, and those add up.


Order intake. Orders arrive by DM, by text, by comment, and from the person who catches you in the school parking lot. So you scroll back through conversations, you check, and then you check again to be sure you did not miss anyone.


Even when you are managing it well, you are starting your bake week from a place of "I hope I did not miss anything." That is stressful before you have touched a single dough, and eventually someone does slip through, which feels awful for you and for them.


You might have all three of these. Most bakers do. What matters is that they are almost never equal. There is usually one that is causing the biggest slowdown, and that is the one worth your attention first.


Three questions that find your biggest bottleneck

You do not need a spreadsheet or a full systems overhaul for this. You need a week of paying attention. Write these three questions where you can see them while you work.

  • Where am I waiting? Look for the moments when you have time set aside for work and nothing you can actually move forward on, because it is all waiting on something else. Standing in the kitchen turning in a circle counts. A planned pause while a dough rests does not, if you built that in on purpose.

  • Where am I repeating work? The checking and rechecking of orders. Moving the labels from the printer to the counter to the packing table. Doing the same small task twice because the first pass did not stick.

  • Where do I feel rushed or stressed? Not "all the time," but the specific pinch points. Pickup starts at eleven, it is 10:40, and there is still bread in the oven. What led to that?

Those questions each point somewhere different. Waiting is usually a production problem. Repeating is usually a systems problem. Rushed and stressed usually means your capacity or your structure is not matching what you have promised.


Spend a week just noticing. Do not change anything yet.


Pick one bottleneck, then ask three things

Now choose one. Not five, and not a rebuild of your entire business. One thing that is slowing you down the most right now. Then walk it through these questions.


Can I remove it? Is this a step you can delete entirely? Labels can go from the printer to your packaging area once, instead of getting relocated three times. Small removals are worth more than they sound.


Can I reduce it? Fewer inputs means less friction. The clearest example is your orders. If you are taking orders through DMs and texts and comments, set up the Simply Bread app or Hotplate today. Either one is great, and you do not need to overthink the choice. Then when someone messages you, say, "To keep things organized and make sure no one slips through the cracks, please place your order through this link. I will have it ready for you at the regular time." I am being your slightly bossy big sister here, because this one change takes a whole category of stress off your plate.


Can I work around it? If you cannot remove or reduce it, come at it from a different angle. Shift your baking schedule so a few loaves bake the night before and cool overnight. Move prep into the gap time earlier in the week, and print your labels on Tuesday instead of between oven batches. Take an item off your menu for a few weeks when it is more than you can realistically offer right now. There are levers in your fermentation timeline that can buy you room in the morning, if your process allows for it. Bring everyone to one pickup location instead of meeting people in three parking lots.


The goal is one small change, not all of them at once. Fixing a single bottleneck has a bigger effect than you expect. It ripples outward, gives you back some mental space, and then you can see the rest of your process clearly enough to improve the next thing.


If you are already busy and a year or three in

Once you are past the beginning and running real volume, a bottleneck stops being an annoyance and starts limiting your revenue. Two things help most at this stage.


First, get specific about your hard limits. How many loaves fit in your oven at a time, how many bannetons your fridge will hold, how many hours your actual schedule allows. Those numbers are fixed, and everything else has to be built around them. I walk through how I calculate mine in Episode 45 on capacity for markets and pre-orders, and I talk through getting more out of a home oven in Episode 36.


Second, turn your repeat decisions into rules. I got tired of deciding my menu from scratch every single month, so I built a system that makes it close to copy and paste. That is the idea behind my simple review system in Episode 116. A decision you make once and then follow is a decision that stops costing you every week.


And when you have removed, reduced and worked around everything you can, and the orders still will not fit in the hours you have, the bottleneck is that you are the only pair of hands. That is a different conversation, and I had it in Episode 111 on hiring an assistant. Hand off the easiest things to teach first.


Final thoughts

Your bake days should feel steady. There will always be some multitasking, that is the nature of food service, but the work should more or less fit inside the time you have. When it does not fit, something has to give, and it should not be you.


This is not a message that everything in your bakery is broken. It is a message that it can feel better, and that it starts with one thing. Go find your biggest bottleneck this week and make one change. A simpler workflow is what makes a bakery last long enough to change the way our children shop for their food!


Cheering you on,


Caroline


Links to things you might like!


 
 
 
bottom of page