From oven to door: a software solution to help craft bakers deliver directly to households.

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Most craft bakeries rely on supplying hospitality businesses such as restaurants and cafes or trading in their own high street shops. The Covid-19 shutdown and lockdown resulted in the loss of most of their usual customers. Therefore, many have introduced home delivery services.This shift from supplying businesses to supplying consumers presents many big operational challenges.Craft bakeries typically deal with hundreds of customer orders every day, all of which need to be produced overnight ready for delivery the next morning. This unique challenge has been addressed from the very earliest days of business computing\[1\] and there are a number of specialised bakery management software systems available, such as Cybake, Flexibake and BaPS.These B2B systems perform the necessary number-crunching to collate customer orders, calculate production requirements, manage recipes, control allergen and nutritional information and organise logistics. However, they are not designed to manage home deliveries.This project will provide craft bakeries with a dedicated online platform that combines consumer-facing e-commerce technology with specialist bakery production functionality. We will re-purpose our existing bakery software platform, transforming it from a business-to-business (B2B) to a business-to-consumer (B2C) system within five months. This system is urgently needed, and we will therefore release new functionality every month.Without this solution, bakers would need to use generic e-commerce platforms for fresh food such as Amazon Fresh, Deliveroo and Uber Eats. However, these do not provide bakers with the necessary specialist functionality and, moreover, have a serious impact on bakers' slim margins.This project will not only assist an industry that has been heavily hit by Covid-19 but will also deliver long-term benefits to society.The current crisis has demonstrated how dependent we now are on supermarkets. By enabling local food producers to supply consumers directly, we can introduce more balance into the supply chain.The "Farm to Fork" movement is well-known; a new "Oven to Door" movement is quickly emerging. Craft bakers are already helping to keep the nation fed and are now providing householders with a much-needed service. This project will help more craft bakeries to do this both in the short and long term.A funding extension enables us to exploit the project outcome in the USA, principally by helping us configure the software to conform to FDA standards regarding the provision of nutritional and allergen information. We also benefit from assistance with marketing and SEO activities in the US which is a new market for us.\[1\] The first business computer was the LEO 1 developed for the bakery café chain Lyons Tea Rooms in 1951