PHILADELPHIA, USA — Winston-Salem, North Carolina-based Camino Bakery has installed Cybake software to manage its three stores and wholesale operation.
Camino Bakery was created by Cary Clifford in 2007 and was inspired by her travels along Europe’s most ancient and longest pilgrimage route, the Camino de Santiago.
Ever since, the bakery has gone from strength to strength, growing from one store to three, alongside a commissary kitchen and a thriving wholesale business. In 2018, long-term managers Lisa Warner and Jordan Poe-Crawford became co-owners.
Cybake is a cloud-based bakery management system used by retail and wholesale bakeries to automate and control everything from orders to invoicing, recipes, shop management, waste control, production, deliveries and more.
Camino Bakery’s Cary Clifford says: “It is back-end software where you put in all of your recipes, and it allows you to create production and packing sheets for all of your people in the back of house to know exactly what they need to make every day. That’s how we’re using it.”
Before adopting Cybake, Camino Bakery ran production for its stores and wholesale operations using Google Sheets spreadsheets.
Cary explains: “It worked okay. But it’s just super easy to put in an order on the wrong row. If you put that in the wrong row on Google Sheets, you’ve accidentally ordered, say, twenty loaves of wholemeal. You have all this wasted product, so that’s not happening anymore, which is fantastic. Our mistakes have just gone from, say, if they were at a hundred, they’re down to one now.”
Another reason Camino Bakery chose Cybake was the system’s ability to let wholesale customers make their orders online. Cybake gives each of the bakery’s customers their own customized product list telling them what items they have on standing order, what they have ordered before, when they ordered it, and more.
Cary says: “Our wholesale customers would text us; they would email us; they would call us. They were sending in orders in all these different formats. Some people were very organized, and some people weren’t organized at all. Our customers now place their own orders and so it’s fantastic because we don’t have to do anything. They just do it online. If there’s a mistake, they made it and they’re not mad at us.”
This has made life much easier for her staff, she says, citing her wholesale manager who now has half his day freed up by Cybake to spend on other tasks.
“That’s helpful to the company,” she says. “Before this, the wholesale manager position was so stressful because we have fifty customers. They don’t place orders every day, but that’s how many people and partners we have, so you can imagine for a wholesale manager, it’d be super easy to mess somebody’s order up on almost a daily basis. A lot of your job is spent just apologizing to someone who’s super irate at you and it was just a terrible job. Now he almost never has to apologize.”
Cary describes Cybake’s implementations team, who helped her bakery get up and running with its new software as fantastic: “I cannot say enough good things about them. Just super responsive, super easy to work with and super knowledgeable.”
Asked whether Camino Bakery would recommend Cybake to other bakeries, she says: “I wish I had found you guys so much earlier. I think it would have really changed the trajectory of our business. I’m grateful that I found you now. I would absolutely recommend this to anyone.”
