The Winter Menu Planning Session That Made Me Realise I'd Outgrown My Spreadsheet

It started with a custard cream. Not literally, but bear with me.

Every October, without fail, I sit down with a coffee and try to plan the winter menu for the bakery. This year I wanted to push the seasonal loaves properly: a dark rye with treacle and caraway, a malted wholegrain tin, maybe a chestnut and rosemary sourdough if I could nail the crumb. Good plans. Ambitious, but the kind of ambitious that feels right when the days are shortening and you actually want to be standing next to a warm oven. The problem arrived when I tried to work out what any of it would actually cost to produce at volume, with two members of staff, across multiple batch sizes. That's when I ended up three layers deep in a spreadsheet that no longer made any sense, eating custard creams, and questioning my life choices.

The bit nobody talks about when you love baking

There's a particular kind of frustration that creeps up on you when you're genuinely good at making bread but not quite on top of the business side of it. The baking itself is fine. Better than fine. Autumn is honestly one of my favourite times of year to work with dough. The kitchen temperature is more forgiving, the flavours you want to use (dark malt, root vegetables, warm spices) behave beautifully in a long ferment, and there's something about the whole mood of the season that makes people want to buy a proper loaf rather than grab something from the supermarket on the way home.

But scaling a recipe from a home test bake to a commercial batch of twenty loaves, then pricing it correctly, then making sure two people on different shifts are following the same process? That's where it gets messy. I'd been running everything through a combination of a Google Sheet I built about three years ago, a notes app on my phone, and a whiteboard in the bakery that everyone adds to in increasingly different handwriting. It worked, sort of, until it really didn't.

Batch scaling sounds simple until it isn't

The chestnut and rosemary loaf was the one that broke me. Chestnut flour behaves differently at different percentages, and the ratio I liked at a single-loaf scale needed adjusting when I went to a ten-loaf batch. Fine, that's just baker's maths. But then factor in the cost of chestnut flour at the current supplier price, the labour time per batch, the shelf life, the packaging, and what you need to charge to actually make a margin worth having. By the time I'd tried to do all of that in the spreadsheet, I'd introduced four different formula errors and lost an hour I really didn't have.

A friend who runs a small bakery up in Hackney mentioned she'd started using the DoughRise Bakery plan, mostly for the commercial batch scaling and the bakery cost reporting. I'd looked at it before and thought it was probably more than I needed. I was wrong about that.

What actually changed

Getting the batch scaling and cost reporting working together properly was the thing I hadn't realised I was missing. When I could see the actual unit cost of a chestnut loaf at different batch sizes, I stopped guessing at the price and started pricing from a real number. That sounds obvious. It is obvious, in theory. In practice, most small bakeries I know are still doing what I was doing, which is pricing based on vibes and hoping the margin works out.

The team accounts feature also turned out to matter more than I'd expected. With two members of staff who do different parts of the process, having everyone working from the same up-to-date recipe and batch plan rather than a whiteboard and a phone photo of my spreadsheet made the handover between shifts noticeably cleaner. Less 'did you remember to adjust the water for the bigger batch?' conversations at seven in the morning.

The dedicated support is the other thing worth mentioning, not because I've needed it constantly, but because knowing it's there when something breaks or I can't work out how a feature is supposed to behave is genuinely reassuring when you're running a small operation without an IT department.

The winter menu is looking good

The chestnut and rosemary loaf is going on the menu. So is the dark rye with treacle, and I've costed both properly now, which means I'm not just hoping they'll be worth baking at scale. There's a version of this autumn where I would have launched them anyway, sold them at the wrong price for six weeks, and quietly dropped them in January. I've done that before with a seasonal loaf. Not this time.

If any of this sounds familiar, whether it's the spreadsheet chaos, the pricing guesswork, or just that feeling of your baking ambitions running slightly ahead of your admin capability, it might be worth having a look at what the DoughRise Bakery plan actually covers. You can find it alongside everything else at doughrise.store.

Happy baking! Find everything you need at doughrise.store

Photo by Liming Wang on Unsplash