Consignment tracking for small bakeries
Bread does not wait. How to keep the count on what you leave in cafes and shops when the product goes stale in three days.
In baking, consignment is the exception rather than the rule, because almost nobody wants three-day-old bread returned. It works for the shelf-stable line — biscuits, biscotti, packaged loaves — and with cafes that already know you.
The sum, in your numbers
- On the shelf last visit
- 40
- Still there today
- 6
- Sold
- 34
- Price per loaf
- MX$45
- Owed
- MX$1,530
Bread is where consignment gets awkward. Everything else sold this way waits: a jar of preserve waits six months, a bag of coffee waits a month. A loaf waits until Thursday.
The real arrangement, not the textbook one
Almost no bakery leaves fresh bread on pure consignment, because returning three-day-old bread helps nobody. What actually happens, every day, is a mix:
- Outright for the day’s bread — the cafe buys it, and whether it sells or gets given away is their business.
- On consignment for the line that keeps — biscuits, biscotti, granola, packaged loaves, flour.
That mix is what gets lost in a notebook, because it is two different accounts with the same shop on the same day. Artisanly keeps them apart: the outright product is booked as a sale, the consigned product is counted on the next visit.
The sum, when the visit is weekly
With a cafe you restock every week, counting takes less time than the coffee. You count what is left of the biscuits, leave more, and the subtraction is done.
What differs from a product that keeps is that the number left over is rarely zero for good reasons — sometimes it is zero because it all sold, and sometimes because the manager pulled it off the shelf on Monday. Recording the write-off separately from the sale is what makes the count useful for deciding how much to leave next time.
What six weeks of counting reveals
Nearly every bakery that starts measuring this finds the same thing.
1 in 3
coming back uneaten
One shop has been receiving the same quantity for months and returning a third of it. Nobody notices in the moment, because each visit on its own looks fine. Six weeks of counts is what makes it obvious.
Meanwhile two or three shops take half the production, and they are the ones worth an extra visit.
Common questions
- Does this work for fresh bread, or only packaged goods?
- The sum is the same for both. What differs is the deal: fresh bread is almost always sold outright, because the shop cannot return it. You can run both arrangements with the same shop.
- What do I do with bread that was left and is no longer sellable?
- Record it as a write-off when you count. It leaves the shop's stock, and you are not charged commission on something nobody bought.