Predictive AI Success: Regional Bakery Achieves 54.2% Waste Reduction with OrderGrid

Challenge

The bakery faced steep daily production challenges. With dozens of short-shelf-life items and fluctuating foot traffic, the team lacked clear visibility into daily prep needs. They relied heavily on store managers to plan prep using spreadsheets and intuition—causing:

• Excess spoilage from overproduction, especially for breads and pastries
• Missed sales when fast-moving items sold out mid-day
• Labor inefficiency due to misaligned staffing and prep schedules
• No forward visibility into demand trends or purchasing needs

These issues added up to tighter margins, operational stress, and slow scalability.

OrderGrid Solution

The bakery’s Management Team partnered with OrderGrid to integrate the AI Demand Forecasting platform directly with the existing POS and historical data. This collaboration established a single, trustworthy source for future product demand at each location, fundamentally improving their planning process.

• SKU-Level Predictive Modeling: The platform ingested historical sales and automatically factored in external variables like seasonality, holidays, and promotional calendars, producing highly reliable daily and hourly demand predictions for every product (90+ SKUs).
• Automated Production Schedule Generation: Head Bakers retired manual spreadsheets. The system delivered exact, optimized production run quantities directly to kitchen teams hours or days in advance, ensuring staff only baked what was needed.
• Strategic Purchasing & Labor Optimization: By providing a reliable 7-day forecast, The Management Team could now align staffing levels and strategic purchasing of high-cost/specialty inputs precisely with expected demand, mitigating the risk of spoilage and reducing inefficient labor time.

Results & Metrics

Waste Cut by 54.2%
By aligning prep with demand, perishable overages dropped from ~12% to ~5.5% across key SKUs saving thousands in wasted raw materials and finished good disposal costs each month.

6.5% More Sales Captured
Improved availability during peak hours kept shelves stocked with high-demand products like croissants and sourdough loaves—helping the bakery recapture revenue previously lost to stockouts.

Staff Productivity Increased
More predictable prep routines cut an average of 2.5 hours of unnecessary labor per day, per location, while improving execution quality and reducing overtime.

7-Day Planning Horizon Unlocked
The shift from reactive, day-to-day prep to a full-week forecast enabled smarter decisions around purchasing, storage, staffing and production—creating space for proactive management and long-term planning.

“OrderGrid gave us confidence in our daily prep. Before, our planning was more instinct than system. Now, we can follow the data, and it’s made every part of our operation more stable and efficient.”

Overall Impact

With OrderGrid in place, the bakery shifted from reactive planning to a more stable, predictable operation. Prep is now aligned to real demand, reducing daily pressure on teams and improving consistency across locations.

Management has greater visibility into what’s needed and when—freeing them to focus more on quality, service, and long-term planning.

Conclusion

With OrderGrid in place, the bakery now runs with more consistency and control day to day. Prep is smoother, planning takes less effort, and teams can stay focused without second-guessing demand. It’s a simpler, more reliable way to operate.