Half the day's sales can pass between half past seven and nine in the morning. Every delay in that window comes straight off the takings.
How does the demand curve get read?
The first job is recording sales hour by hour for a week.
In most businesses the curve gives two peaks: half seven to nine, and midday to one.
Sales at the peak can run three or four times the average. Capacity gets planned against the peak, not the average.
Weekdays and weekends get measured separately; the two curves often look nothing alike.
| Time band | Typical share of sales | Product needed ready |
|---|---|---|
| 07:00-07:30 | 8% | Cabinet opens full |
| 07:30-09:00 | 42% | 2 batches |
| 09:00-11:30 | 15% | 1 batch |
| 11:30-13:30 | 25% | 2 batches |
| 13:30-close | 10% | As demand dictates |
How does batch size get calculated?
The formula is simple: the rate of sale at peak multiplied by the oven cycle.
In a business selling sixty poğaça an hour, a ten-minute cycle means a batch of ten.
A safety margin goes on top. Twenty-five percent extra absorbs a sudden group order.
Too large a batch leaves product standing in the cabinet and produces waste at close. Too small a batch produces a queue.
How does oven capacity get chosen?
A single-deck convection oven takes forty to fifty poğaça on a standard tray.
On an eight-minute cycle that gives roughly three hundred an hour, more than enough for most small businesses.
The real bottleneck is not the oven but the number of trays. A business working with two trays cannot load one while the other bakes, and the cycle stretches.
Keeping four trays raises capacity noticeably without buying equipment.
How does the cabinet get managed?
The cabinet divides into two zones: front row and back row.
The front row gets filled from the latest batch, the back row from the one before.
Sales come from the front. That keeps the product turning in first-in, first-out order.
The cabinet never empties. An empty cabinet reads as sold out and lowers the intention to buy.
At most three varieties share a cabinet. More varieties slow the turnover of each one and raise waste.
How do the staff tasks divide?
At peak, three jobs separate: oven, cabinet and till.
If one person takes product from the oven and works the till, the cycle breaks.
On a two-person shift the right split is one on till and cabinet, the other on oven and preparation.
The person on the oven follows the cycle by the clock. Timing left to smell or to eye costs two or three minutes a batch.
How does the frozen stock get planned?
Planning runs off weekly sales in units.
Safety stock equals a day and a half of sales. Below that, a late delivery empties the shelf directly.
Freezer capacity is often the constraint. A cubic metre of freezer holds roughly eight hundred to a thousand poğaça.
Stock rotates by the order it arrived rather than the date printed on the box. That stops the oldest product sinking to the bottom.
How does waste get controlled?
Waste means heated product unsold at the end of the day. Frozen stock does not count as waste.
An acceptable rate runs three to five percent of what gets heated daily.
Above that figure the batches are too large.
The last batch comes out an hour and a half before closing and runs at half the usual size.
Discounting what remains at the end of the day works, though once it becomes routine customers wait for that hour and full-price sales fall.
Do the heating parameters stay fixed?
They do, and that is a question of quality.
A hundred and sixty degrees and eight minutes in a convection oven gets written down and posted beside the oven.
When every member of staff uses the same figures the product comes out the same all day.
The one exception is a full oven against a half-full one. Working with half a tray, the time shortens by a minute.
What gets measured?
Three numbers get followed: units sold daily, units wasted, and queue time at peak.
Queue time can be measured with a phone: the interval between joining the queue and receiving the product.
A queue passing two minutes shows the capacity is short.
Compared week by week, those three numbers show whether a change has worked.
Which mistakes come up most often?
The first is baking the whole morning in one batch. A poğaça sold at nine and baked at seven tastes of the difference.
The second is keeping too many varieties. Five kinds of poğaça lower the chance of any of them being fresh.
The third is holding heated product over to the next day. That fails on both quality and safety.
The fourth is thawing before baking. The product goes into the oven frozen; a thawed poğaça comes out with a wet base.
What changes on the cost side?
For a business moving to a pre-baked frozen product, the unit cost rises.
Against that, three lines fall: labour, waste and equipment.
A kitchen making its own dough needs someone starting at five in the morning. A pre-baked product removes that need.
The decision comes from comparing total cost rather than unit cost. Below a hundred units a day, the pre-baked frozen product almost always works out cheaper.
