It’s 2am. Your production manager is building today’s bake list from a stack of standing orders that were last updated — when, exactly? Someone called yesterday to change the white to 180 and add 50 rye. Someone wrote it on a sticky note. Whether that sticky note made it to the production floor is anyone’s guess.
Standing orders are the backbone of wholesale bakery operations. They represent 60-80% of daily production volume, and they drive everything downstream: production planning, ingredient purchasing, and route scheduling.
What Standing Orders Actually Are
A standing order is a recurring order from a customer that repeats on a defined schedule. A grocery store that orders 200 loaves of white bread every Tuesday and Thursday has a standing order. A restaurant that receives 50 dinner rolls every morning except Sunday has a standing order.
In a wholesale bakery, standing orders aren’t just sales transactions. They’re the foundation of production planning.
Why Standing Orders Get Complicated
- Day-of-week variations. The same customer orders more on Fridays and less on Mondays. Some products only go out on certain days.
- Holiday holds. Customer closes for Thanksgiving. No delivery. But they want double the order the day before.
- Seasonal adjustments. A hot dog bun order that doubles in summer. Christmas stollen that appears in November.
- One-off modifications. The customer calls at 4pm to cancel tomorrow’s rye bread but keep everything else.
- Cut-off time enforcement. At some point, you have to stop accepting changes because production needs to start.
How Most Bakeries Manage Standing Orders Today
The honest answer: spreadsheets, binders, and institutional memory. A master spreadsheet maintained by one person, printed weekly, handed to the production manager. Changes come in by phone, text, or email and get written on the printed copy.
This works when you have 20 customers and 30 SKUs. It stops working when you have 80 customers and 200 SKUs.
What a Proper Standing Order System Looks Like
- Baseline patterns with day-of-week granularity. Daily breakdowns, not weekly totals.
- Exception handling that doesn’t corrupt the baseline. One-off changes revert automatically.
- Holiday calendar integration. Automatic suppression and pre-holiday adjustments.
- Cut-off time enforcement. Orders lock after cut-off with an audit trail.
- Direct feed to production planning. No manual re-entry required.
The Downstream Impact
Standing orders are the first domino: production planning, ingredient purchasing, route scheduling, and invoicing all depend on accurate standing order data.
How FlexiBake Helps
FlexiBake manages standing orders with day-of-week scheduling, holiday holds, seasonal adjustments, and one-off overrides built in. Standing orders feed directly into production planning and route scheduling — no re-keying, no printed sheets, no sticky notes.