Labels at four in the morning
The flapjack and the brownies are cut and bagged. The seeded loaves are wrapped. Now someone has to label them. The label printer has templates for some products; for others, the text is retyped. The date is changed by hand each night. For the new carrot cake, someone writes labels with a pen because the template has not been made yet.
One night the date is not changed. The shops receive labels dated the day before, and the phone rings in the morning.
Why labelling stays manual
Label printers in small bakeries are usually standalone machines, set up once by whoever was keen at the time. Product details are stored in the printer, separately from recipes and from the order list. Every new product and every change needs someone to edit the printer's template, and quantities are counted by hand.
- Product information is typed into the label printer separately.
- Dates are changed by hand each night.
- New products have no template yet.
- Quantities to print are counted from the bake list.
- Recipe changes do not reach the labels automatically.
What manual labelling costs
Time at the busiest point of the night. Mistakes on dates, weights or product names, which mean relabelling, returns or awkward calls from shops. And the uncomfortable knowledge that the labels depend on one person getting everything right when tired.
What goes on your labels, and the date rules for each product, are decided by you and whoever advises you. We do not advise on labelling rules. We make printing follow your approved records.
Label printing we build
- Each product has one approved record: name, weight, ingredients text and any other wording you have approved, plus the date rule you have set for it.
- Changes to a product record go through a simple approval, so what prints is always the approved version.
- At the end of the night's plan, the system knows how many of each wrapped product are being made, from the bake list.
- Labels for each product are printed in the right quantity with tonight's dates calculated from your rules, on your existing label printer where it can be driven from a computer, or on a new one if not.
- Customer-specific labels, such as a shop's own brand, are printed from the same records with their layout.
- A log records what was printed each night, with the product record version used.
| Label detail | Comes from |
|---|---|
| Product name, weight, ingredients | Approved product record |
| Date | Your date rule for that product, applied tonight |
| Quantity to print | The night's bake list |
| Layout | Your template or the customer's |
What the early hours look like
The labeller presses print for each product, and the right number of labels with the right date comes out. New products get labels as soon as their record is approved. Recipe changes reach labels because both come from the same place. And there is a record of what was printed if a shop asks.
Shops that stock your wrapped goods notice the difference as well. Labels are consistent from night to night, the product names match what is on their invoice, and a shop's own-brand label carries the same approved details as yours.
The person doing the labels does not have to be the one who knows everything. Anyone on the night team can run it, which matters when someone is off sick at the busiest time of year.
Does your labelling look like this?
- Label text is retyped into the printer.
- Dates are changed by hand each night.
- Some products are labelled with a pen.
- Labels have gone out with the wrong date.
- Recipe changes do not reach the labels reliably.