You have a point. If I were doing higher volumes at retail, the thought process would be much simpler. Make up a 60% starter on 8kg of flour in the evening. In the morning, empty a 16kg sack of flour into the mixer, chuck in 500g of salt and 12kg of water at an appropriate temperature to finish at 21C. Mix on first speed for to a shaggy mess (about five minutes), then about 8 minutes on second speed to moderate gluten development. Bulk ferment in a cool part of the bakehouse for 3 hours, with 3 folds 40 minutes apart, scale off large and small loaves, shape, prove until slightly underproved (4.5–6 hours) then retard overnight. Back in the bakery at 4 the next morning and, bake everything off and get it to market by 8am.
But today, my customers want 9 large multigrain loaves, 4 small ones, 3 really small soup bowl loaves, a dozen large white sours, 5 small and a couple of dozen bun loaves. On Friday they will want substantially different quantities. If I want to keep selling 95–100% of everything I bake, then I need accurate quantities, and I’d rather offload that essentially trivial calculation on a tool that gets it right every time. Five minutes after I arrive in the bakehouse, I have an accurate production sheet with the right quantities on it and I can concentrate on the far more important task of actually making the bread. I’ve spent maybe a couple of days, over the last year and a bit implementing the production planning software. Time well spent, I reckon.
It. Doesn’t. Matter. Use the too, you’re comfortable in and you’ll be way more productive than dropping everything to learn something new. Do that when the limitations of your current tool start to grate on you.
Yeah. Lots of hand waving in the piece because it was a choice between something I could write in a morning for a general audience or, frankly, not bothering to write anything at all.
A bakery formula is an acyclic directed graph running from top level “product” nodes (a loaf of bread, say) through one or more intermediate formulae until you reach basic ingredients. For a given set of orders, you need to work out how much of which ingredient to mix at each step in the process. If I were only working in, say six loaf batches, it’d probably be easier to use a ready reckoner approach, but it’s a tiny bakery and I’d rather not deal with the wastage so I only bake what’s ordered.
After about the third time I fucked up the pencil and paper calculations, I decided to automate (then at least the bad calculations were repeatable, and only needed fixing once).
For the actual business of making the bread it’s a matter of printing off a single production schedule for the day and taking that into the bakehouse. Touchscreens are a hygiene nightmare in food prep areas.
Yup. The spreadsheet is an amazing innovation, I just find all the repetition when adding something that should just be data to be monumentally frustrating. And I have no idea how to make a sheet that copes with orders for Friday and Saturday when a when each batch takes three calendar days. I suppose making a new copy of the basic sheet for each batch would do the job.
Yup. Bakeries have been run using a pen and paper daybook and the master baker’s skill for centuries. But the calculations are still a pain in the arse, so automating that is a big win. The Bread Matters spreadsheet I based the database schema on was made by someone who was a baker, not a programmer, and for a fixed set of recipes, it’s brilliant. If I hadn’t known the rudiments of RDBMS design I’d have bitten the bullet, extended the sheet and grumbled every time I had to add a new formula.