Shipping Delays and Their Impact on Baked Goods

Bakers have a big enough challenge serving up consistently fresh goods when facing supply chain disruptions. Whether you acquire your ingredients directly from a manufacturer or pick them up at your local grocery store, chances are it’s taking longer for ingredients to reach those destinations, shortening the amount of time you have left before they expire.

The prices of everything from ingredients to fuel, to labor and overhead are all going up simultaneously. Some businesses have no choice but to pass on the costs to the customer to stay profitable. If there were a way to streamline your production processes to reduce waste and track ingredients on their way to become finished products, you would have a better handle on your inventory quantities and costs. If you’re watching your expenses but need a software that can give you better inventory control, including lot tracking and food traceability, SOS Inventory offers a very affordable solution for small businesses.

Where Can Software Help You Make Improvements?

Identify and Reduce Waste:  The ability to generate product reports for in-depth analysis provides you with direction in finding where waste occurs. Does it show up as batter left in a mixer, broken eggs, or misplaced bags of flour? Do you have an ongoing problem that can be fixed with an equipment repair? Knowing where to look and who to talk to will help you develop a strategy to reduce waste, remove bottlenecks and increase profitability.

Track Tainted Product: It’s the last thing you want to think about but recalls happen all the time. If you ever need to track down a tainted product, you can use lot tracking to track expiration dates and locate a product forward or backward in its journey. This is very important for locating bad product quickly to save your reputation and reduce the exposure of customers to bad product. You can also pinpoint exactly what day’s products were affected, limiting how much you need to destroy.

Create Transparency: Not sure where your money is going or why your physical inventory never seems to match your books? Pooling all the information from every area of your business can solve this problem. Keeping your records up to date is easier when inventory quantities and costs are updated in your QuickBooks Online account every time you make a change to your inventory.

The past few years have been nothing short of challenging for small business owners. It takes creativity (something we’re already good at) and fortitude to push through these challenge to see growth on the other side.