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A bakery or central kitchen is manufacturing on a 24-hour clock: produce fresh every day, in quantities guessed before demand exists, from ingredients whose prices move, for outlets and clients who want delivery before seven. Overproduce and the margin goes in the bin; underproduce and the shelves are bare by ten. The whole trade is a daily forecasting problem with flour on it.
What matters here
- Production from data — daily bake quantities driven by recent sales by day-of-week, adjusted for seasons and orders, not by the head baker's optimism.
- Recipes as costed BoMs — every product's ingredients and yields maintained, so butter's price rise shows up in croissant margin the same week.
- Multi-outlet dispatch — production allocated to branches and wholesale clients with confirmed quantities, because 'the van took some trays' is not a record.
- The wastage line — unsold and returned product recorded daily by item, since in fresh food the bin is where profit actually disappears.
The main options
Recipes live as bills of materials in Odoo Manufacturing, with daily production runs consuming ingredients from Odoo Inventory at real costs — making margin per item a live number rather than an annual estimate. Ingredient buying runs through Odoo Purchase against consumption rates and lead times, retail counters ring through Odoo POS feeding tomorrow's forecast with today's truth, and wholesale clients — cafes, hotels, offices — order on standing schedules billed cleanly through Odoo Invoicing at their contracted prices.
How to choose
Start with your ten biggest products: real recipes, real yields, current ingredient prices — most bakeries immediately find an item they love that loses money at volume. Then run the daily loop for a month: forecast, produce, sell, record waste, adjust. The operations are humble, but compounding one percent improvements in a business that produces every single day is how the trade's quiet fortunes are made.