Sustainability is no longer desirable for hospitality businesses — it’s a necessity. The pressure and motivation to become more sustainable is coming from every direction:
- New regulations. Environmental and social governance (ESG) standards and regulations are coming into effect, such as the Climate-Related Financial Disclosure (CRFD) and the UK Sustainability Disclosure Standards (SDS). This means that bakeries (and other hospitality businesses) must report on your sustainability practices, and ensure you contribute positively to environmental preservation and social justice.
- From the consumers themselves. Consumers are making more environmentally conscious decisions than ever before. 61% of consumers say that the sustainability credentials of a bakery product affect whether they buy it. They care about what brands stand for, which means that being sustainable can help you attract more customers.
- The margins are calling for it. There’s no denying it — times are tough, and it makes financial sense to minimise food waste. The less you spend on ingredients you don’t need, the higher your profit margins will be.
Now, we know what you’re thinking. All of this sounds like a lot of work, and you’ve already got a million and one things on your plate (pun intended). But there are some pretty simple things you can do to improve your sustainability efforts and bakery food waste.
So let’s dive right in. Here are five strategies you can implement in your bakery to enhance sustainability and be better for the environment. Plus, we outline some real-life examples of bakeries leading the way in sustainability. 💪
1. Optimise stock management to meet demand at site level
Overstocking is one of the biggest contributors to bakery food waste. It means you have too much stock on your shelves and not enough demand to use it.
The results? The food spoils before you have a chance to prepare it in your central bakery — which is especially common for short-shelf-life products we commonly see in bakeries. And when food goes to waste, sustainability takes a hit.
So what’s the solution to excess bakery food waste?
Optimising your stock management.
This means only ordering the ingredients that you actually need to meet customer demand.
At a central bakery level, this involves monitoring demand at each bakery location and ensuring you order the right amount of ingredients and raw materials to your main kitchen. Then, it means sending the right amount of baked goods to individual locations to prevent waste at an on-site level.
How Nory can solve this problem 🔊
Nory’s AI-powered software can help you accurately track demand across all your bakery locations. Our inventory management and sales forecasting features allow you to order the right amount of ingredients to your central kitchen, and send the right baked goods to each location to meet customer demand.
Nory also provides suggestions to bakery managers on what they should order. This reduces the amount of time managers spend manually figuring out what to order, minimises food waste, and prevents stockouts. Talk about efficiency, right? 😎
Nory success story 🥳 Find out how one of the UKs leading bakeries uses Nory to accurately predict demand, with sales forecasts achieving a 3.3% accuracy rate in the first half of 2024. They can now optimise inventory to meet customer demand, improving the variance between the target and actual gross profit by 45% in just two months.
“Nory shows us that every store uses ingredients differently. For example, we can spot when specific stores use higher-priced ingredients. We can then find ways to reduce costs and increase our overall GP.”
2. Ensure accurate production at the central bakery
Your central bakery is the cornerstone of your food production. It’s where you prepare all your baked goods before sending them to individual bakery locations.
So what happens if you overestimate how much food you need to prepare in your central kitchen? Your bakery locations are left with a lot of leftover food — and you’re facing the harsh reality of a less sustainable business.
But the good news? You can optimise your production plan to prevent this from happening and minimise bakery food waste. This is where Nory can help.😎
How Nory can solve this problem 🔊
Nory provides real-time insights into your performance to help you create accurate and optimal production plans.
Nory predicts hourly sales for each venue with 90-95% accuracy. This gives you complete certainty in planning your production, creating optimal processes, and ensuring you have exactly what you need to meet customer demand.
Plus, using Nory centralises your production planning in one place. With multiple bakery locations, having a single place to do all your production planning makes the entire process easier to manage and more efficient.
3. Utilise food waste reduction apps like Too Good To Go
Partnering with food waste reduction apps, like Too Good To Go, is a great way to minimise the amount of food you throw away. It involves signing up to the platform, listing any excess stock or meals, and allowing customers to buy it at a reduced rate.
These apps are a great way these apps help you minimise food waste while also engaging with your community. Listing food on these apps shows that you care about the environment and that you’d rather give food to local customers for a low price than throw it away. It’s a good boost for your brand reputation.
The apps also covers some of your costs so you’re not totally out of pocket on food items that don’t sell at full price. Although you’re not really making any profit off of these food sales, so that’s something to bear in mind.
If you want to bring your waste levels closer to 0 and still make a healthy proft, you need a platform like Nory to drive bakery sustainability.
How Nory can solve this problem 🔊
Use Nory to ensure you have the right amount of ingredients to meet customer demand. Take a look at Clean Kitchen as an example.
Using Nory, Clean Kitchen sees a line-by-line breakdown of its costs, usage, and profits. As a result, they can make informed decisions about how to improve their stock management, ensuring they only order the ingredients they need to reduce costs and minimise food waste.
The results speak for themselves, with the business decreasing its cost of goods sold (COGs) by 4%—thus increasing gross profits (GP) by 4%.
4. Educate and train staff about sustainability
To create a sustainable bakery, you need to train your staff. This helps you build a supportive and engaged workforce, which is crucial to ensuring sustainability throughout the business.
Take a look at Bread 41 as an example. Sustainability is a core pillar of their brand, which includes monitoring and holding themselves accountable for waste. This means ensuring all of their staff understand the impact of waste and how to reduce it in the business’s day-to-day operations.
Patisserie Valerie is another example. The bakery recognises the value of investing in people as a key stepping stone to sustainability, saying that:
“The most sustainable thing we do is to keep investing in and training bakers and pastry chefs to ensure the generations to come can continue to enjoy our famous cakes for another 100 years.”
Here are a few examples of how to educate and train your workforce on bakery sustainability:
- Show them why it’s important. Lead the way by making commitments as a business to reduce your carbon footprint. This will show employees exactly why sustainability is important, and motivate them to make sustainable choices while working.
- Explain your sustainable best practices. Walk employees through your best practices for being sustainable. For example, separating recyclables, minimising water and energy consumption, and so on. You can also engage with engage with your communities to promote environmental awareness and eco-friendly practices. This is another way to show local patrons that you care about the environment, which can boost your brand perception and help the planet in the process — it’s a win-win. 🎉
- Train different teams differently. It’s important to outline the best practices for different teams in the bakery. Your central kitchen staff, for example, need to know about how to minimise food waste and composting excess stock. Customer facing staff, however, should learn about eco-friendly cleaning and energy efficiency (like only refilling water glasses when customers ask for it).
How Nory can solve this problem 🔊
Track your sustainability efforts to ensure staff are making good choices and following your best practices. For example, if food waste is high in one of your bakery locations, you can talk to staff about how to minimise this waste and increase their sustainability efforts.
5. Optimise ingredient sourcing
When done right, using local and seasonal products can reduce your carbon footprint*. Think about it — local products require less transportation, which means less greenhouse gas emissions and energy use.
Using local suppliers often means having a shorter supply chain, which can minimise spoilage and waste. Seasonal products are also fresher and better tasting, so it’s a win-win.
One of the main issues with relying on local suppliers is consistency and reliability of supply.
Local and seasonal ingredients can be subject to variability in availability due to things like weather conditions, seasonal changes, and local agricultural yields. This can lead to potential disruptions in supply chains, making it difficult to maintain a steady inventory of essential ingredients.
How Nory can solve this problem 🔊
Use Nory to track price increases with vendors. Receive alerts if pricing has changed so that you can make sure that your costs are in-check as soon as possible. Plus, it gives you more negotiation power with local suppliers when discussing prices. You can see exactly what your prices are, what they used to be, what you need them to be currently. This means you know exactly what you’re negotiating for when you approach your supplier.
Nory success story 🥳 See how Rocksalt used Nory to optimise its supply chain and minimise inventory costs across all of its venues.
“Because all the ordering and invoices are updated daily, we can catch a price increase from a supplier pretty much instantly. As soon as we spot it, we can react to it immediately.”
Stephen Burns, Group Operations Manager at Rocksalt
*Local doesn’t always mean sustainable. Other factors influence whether local produce is more sustainable, like how farmers harvest their ingredients, rear their animals, and so on. It’s best to spend some time learning about how your suppliers operate to ensure you choose the most sustainable option.
Bakeries thinking outside the box to become a sustainable bakery
Buns from Home
Buns from Home makes a lot of different baked goods, but only from one type of dough. This laminated croissant dough is rolled and shaped to create the entire menu, meaning that the bakers can easily use surplus stock to create more buns.
In fact, 35% of the menu is created from surplus stock, and 20% of sales are products made from fighting food waste.
Find out more about Buns from Home’s sustainability efforts.
Bread 41
Bread 41 has launched a Move to Zero initiative, following a B Corp framework to create a sustainable environment. The most innovative part of this initiative? The biodigester.
The bio-digester banishes all organic food waste, ensuring that it’s disposed of with as little environmental impact as possible.
Here are some other initiatives that Bread 41 is rolling out:
- Using a sustainable alternative to greaseproof paper
- Cutting down on the chemicals used in cleaning
- Moving towards plastic-free
- Removing single-use cups, preventing over 34,000 cups from going to landfill in 2023.
You can read more about these initiatives here or on the Bakery 41 website.
GAIL’s
It’s safe to say that GAIL’s really thinks outside the box on sustainability — even when it comes to lighting and interior.
Working with Shoplight, the bakery implemented lighting made from Nort, a bio-polymer lighting solution made from plant-based materials. Nort is produced using 95% less CO2 emissions than traditional aluminium spotlights.
With this eco-friendly lighting, GAIL’s limited its negative impact on the environment. Michelle Pollard-Smith, the Senior Project Manager at GAIL’s, said:
“Supporting a long-term partner was the initial draw but importantly we found that Nort supports our drive to use more sustainable materials with a lower carbon footprint across the GAIL’s estate.”
Nort is now being used in all up-and-coming GAIL’s locations (provided they have track-mounted fittings). You can read the full story here.
Use Nory to run a more sustainable bakery operation
Creating a sustainable operation is no mean feat — but in the current climate, it’s necessary. It helps you reduce costs, minimise food waste, and lessen your impact on the environment.
To get started on your journey to sustainability, give Nory a try. Our AI-powered software provides you with real-time access to performance data. You can make quick and informed decisions about how to improve sustainability and increase your bottom line.
FAQs about sustainable bakeries
How can bakeries be more sustainable?
There are different things that bakeries can do to be more sustainable, including:
- Optimising stock management
- Ensuring accurate production in your central bakery
- Minimising food waste across the business
- Sourcing local ingredients
- Using eco-friendly packaging
- Minimising water and electricity usage
- Engaging with and involving the community in sustainability efforts
One of the key puzzle pieces to being more sustainable is using the right technology. With Nory, for example, you can access real-time insights that help you track food waste and optimise your stock levels from a single location. As a result, you can implement changes to be more sustainable. You can thank us later. 😉
What are sustainable ingredients for baking?
There are different ways to use sustainable ingredients in baking. For the most part, choosing locally-sourced, seasonal, and organic ingredients is better for the environment. Ensuring that ingredients are ethically sourced, have minimal transport emissions, and using plant-based alternatives where applicable are some of the other ways to use sustainable ingredients.
How can a bakery reduce wastage?
There are lots of ways to reduce food waste in a bakery. Accurately predicting customer demand, improving your stock management, and optimising your supply chain are just a few examples.
