Cooplands Bakery has installed Cybake ISB software to plan and manage in-store sandwich production across its entire retail estate.
Cooplands Bakery was founded in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, in 1885 and is the second largest retail bakery chain in the United Kingdom. It operates two production bakeries, 158 shops and a fleet of sandwich delivery vans across Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, and the North East.
Cybake ISB, from York-based bakery software developer Cybake, is a retail production planning system that improves availability, increases sales and cuts waste for in-store bakeries and fresh food counters.
Using advanced forecasting, Cybake ISB tells store staff the best combination of sandwiches to make at the right times via tablets. At the same time, Cybake ISB shows Cooplands Bakery’s head office exactly how production, sales and waste are going across its stores, with key KPIs.
Sandwiches make up somewhere approaching 30% of Cooplands Bakery’s sales. However, before the adoption of Cybake ISB, head office had little control over what or how many sandwiches each store made.
To see whether Cybake ISB could improve the availability of the sandwiches that customers wanted at the right times of the day, the company initially ran a small-scale trail of Cybake ISB.
Cooplands Bakery’s central operations manager Carole Hay says: “We did it against five control shops to get some analysis and it increased the sales of the store overall. It increased the sales of the pre-made sandwiches.”
Cooplands has now rolled the system out across all of its shops, giving head office a clear view of exactly what should be made and whether each shop is complying.
While emphasising that the service aspect of made-to-order sandwiches is still important to attract customers, Carole says: “Efficiency wise, it’s a lot better because we can have those sandwiches pre-made in the morning before the lunchtime rush.
“The production plan has helped. It’s helped with compliance. It has helped with waste, but it’s also helped with availability, and it is something we will continue with. And we are going to investigate using Cybake ISB for our savouries later in the year.”
Cybake ISB has also helped Cooplands better manage demand according to local tastes.
“We have regional sandwiches,” Carole explains, citing a pease pudding stottie (mushed yellow split peas on a flat round loaf) as an example of a popular choice for Cooplands Bakery customers in Sunderland.
“That just wouldn’t sell in Lincolnshire,” she says. “They don’t know what it is. We’re really quite clever now with the sandwich plan, we’ve got templates for everything. So, it has allowed us to have control over that regional side as well, whereas previously we didn’t.”
Cybake ISB is an entirely separate product from the Cybake bakery management software system, which Cooplands Bakery has been using since 2020, primarily to automate the replenishment of stock in each of its retail outlets.
Martin Coyle, Cybake’s commercial director, worked closely on Cooplands Bakery’s installation of Cybake ISB.
He says: “Cybake ISB was originally developed for supermarkets, so this was the first time it was tested outside that specific sector. The team at Cooplands Bakery are great to work with and it has been exciting to see how well Cybake ISB works within a large network of bakery shops. Currently, we are in talks with retail bakery chains of a similar scale about using the software in the USA and in Australia too.”
