SCALING BAKERY OPERATIONS FOR GROWTH

Diana Cortes-Blanquicet co-founded DOU Bakehouse in 2015, growing it from a home kitchen into a wholesale bakery in Lakeland, Florida. Today, DOU Bakehouse supplies cookies, muffins, cakes, breads, and donuts to coffee shops, resorts, and theme parks in the Orlando area.

When a world-famous Orlando theme park showed interest in her products, Cortes-Blanquicet faced a critical challenge: her bakery needed better systems to meet strict documentation and traceability requirements. Many other bakeries relied on cumbersome paper binders and Excel spreadsheets, but she knew there had to be a better way.

After exploring several technical solutions, she found most were either overly complex or too expensive—until she discovered one that was just the right fit - Wherefour's ERP Platform.

CLOUD-BASED AUDITING AND TRACEABILITY IN REAL-TIME

Wherefour provides total forward-and-backward ingredient traceability reports with the push of one button along with many other tools including inventory forecasting, bar code scanning, production management, invoicing and integration with hundreds of other online platforms. Its production and traceability software allowed DOU Bakehouse to gain the theme park’s business and to continue to pass its ongoing auditing and other requirements with flying colors.

“We recently completed our required annual third party audit. For the traceability portion, the auditor selects one product and times us to see how long it takes to check where the product is in-house and at customer locations. The auditor also manually checks in-house inventory against what is in our records,” Cortes-Blanquicet said. “It took us less than 10 minutes to complete that portion of the audit successfully. That capability is so important because if there is a recall, it’s much faster to pull the product.”

Cortes-Blanquicet also reaps other benefits from the system, including being able to monitor and run her business from anywhere because Wherefour is fully cloud-based and mobile. She also appreciates Wherefour’s ability to record everything that happens in one place. “I can travel and still know what is going on. The system automatically lets me know if I need to place an inventory order, and I don’t have to check it manually,” Cortes-Blanquicet said. “If something is not done right, we know exactly what happened and can correct the situation for the future.”