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A comment on Show HN: Fresh-baked rustic sourdough bread, delivered within 20 minutes. Parent comment

Re:Show HN: Fresh-baked rustic sourdough bread, delivered wi... by ChuckMcM on Sunday March 23, 2014 @03:30PM (#7454682)
So you achieved your goal right? Historically bakeries are very 'spikey' in their demand, a friend of mine runs one and they spend 3AM to 6AM making donuts and bagels which they sell out of between 6AM and 7:15AM, and then sell maybe a handful or two for the rest of the day.

Given the complexities of bread, it would interesting to hear a post mortem about ways you might both account for spikes without compromising delivery times, delivery scheduling to make maximum use of delivery resources, and even recipe variations to support those goals.

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Re:Show HN: Fresh-baked rustic sourdough bread, delivered wi... by HeyLaughingBoy on Sunday March 23, 2014 @09:59PM (#7456272)
That's an interesting logistic problem I hadn't even thought of. I bake a lot of bread (today's was buttermilk chile cheddar) and it can be very uncooperative and unpredictable, unlike cakes and other pastry.

I understand that in a production environment they will be more process driven than my own kitchen, but I wonder what the timing variation is in the typical small commercial bakery. i.e., from start of mixing to fresh bread out the oven, how repeatable is the time to completion?

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Re:Show HN: Fresh-baked rustic sourdough bread, delivered wi... by enterthemist on Sunday March 23, 2014 @04:15PM (#7454929)
There is a donut place in Berkeley that works very similar to that. The reason for them is that there are a lot of large-scale orders that want the donuts for breakfast (e.g. the school dining facilities).
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Re:Show HN: Fresh-baked rustic sourdough bread, delivered wi... by ballard on Sunday March 23, 2014 @06:58PM (#7455639)
150 tiny orders is like cutting down a forest with a herring. Catering events is where the real cash is at. Large universities like Stanford operate like cities with 100s of autonomous departments free to choose whichever vendor/s they like.
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