Production Planning for Bakeries & Small Food Businesses
Turn a week of customer orders into a batch-by-batch production plan. Recipe Toolset connects your products, orders and inventory so you know exactly what to make — without rebuilding the same spreadsheet every Sunday night.
How production planning works
Four pieces that feed each other. Set up the first two once, and the plan follows from the orders you are already taking.
- Step 1
Define your products
Set up product types and their variants — a sourdough loaf in 500g and 1kg, a cookie in four flavours. Each variant records the batch yield, so the planner knows one batch makes twenty-four, not one.
- Step 2
Take customer orders
Log orders with the variants and quantities each customer wants, and move them through pending, confirmed, in production and fulfilled as the week progresses.
- Step 3
Track what you hold
Keep stock levels against each variant. Fulfilling an order deducts what it consumed, so the numbers stay honest without a separate spreadsheet.
- Step 4
Get your production plan
The planner reads every open order, subtracts what you already have in stock, and converts the shortfall into whole batches — the list of what to actually make.
Built around how small kitchens actually produce
Most recipe apps stop at the recipe. This picks up where a growing food business needs more.
Batch-aware quantities
Production is planned in batches, not units. If eleven loaves are owed and a batch yields six, the plan calls for two batches — and shows the arithmetic it used, so you can sanity-check a number before you commit an oven to it.
Orders drive the plan
Only pending, confirmed and in-production orders count toward demand. Fulfilled orders drop out automatically, so a plan built on Monday is not inflated by last week.
Stock offsets demand
Inventory on hand is netted against orders before batches are calculated, so you are not making what is already sitting on the shelf.
Who it is for
Production planning is for the point where cooking becomes a business — a home bakery taking weekend pre-orders, a market stall producing to a Saturday deadline, a small cafe or caterer running repeatable batches.
If you are tracking orders on paper and working out batch counts in your head, this replaces that. If you are running a multi-site commercial operation with ERP requirements, you will likely outgrow it — and that is fine.
Plan your next production run
Start with a free account and your recipes. Production planning is included with the Business plan.