Covid has resulted in restrictions of movement everywhere, affecting bakery retail sales.

Within the past 18 months, competition has sprouted up from online home bakers who were otherwise full-time office professionals previously.

In the past few months, you have gone through nonstop interviewing, hired new people who seemed to have no respect for their master chefs, or you as their boss.

Sales are reduced with lesser footfall in malls, making inventory much harder to predict and control.

How can you keep your bakery brand going STRONG through this new Covid era?

1. Create with Quality as Your Topmost Priority

At this juncture, quality is number one. For you to cut through all the noise of the new budding baker entrepeneur to the existing bakery conglomerates, QUALITY of your new creations is essential to survival.

By all means, plan a healthier, colourful new series featuring your signature rolls, donuts and muffins. Whilst foregoing that preservative or artificial coloring answers to consumers’ needs today, you must remember that eventually, your bakes must look and taste great even after a few days chilled in the refrigerator.

The solution is not to sacrifice healthier concerns by using artificial colorings and chemical preservatives.

Invest in a high-quality plant-based emulsifier (Ryoto Ester SP) proven to keep the natural colors vibrant, stabilize the fats and water in the batters.

Of course, you want to be consistently producing fine air bubbles in your sponge cakes — for smooth and fluffy textures that last over days!

2. Make Your Ingredients More Efficient!

Without affecting quality – whatever that you do, do not sacrifice on taste, textures and mouthfeel.

If you can reduce the amount of ingredients for each recipe, imagine the savings in your inventory.

How do you go about making your recipes more efficient?

• Eggs – Is there a way to reduce the number of eggs used? Eggs provide aroma, flavour and serve as emulsifiers in the bakes
• Shortening – Do you really need to use up to 10% of shortening in your sweet buns? What will happen if you halve it or even omit it?
• Improver – Is this needed? Or can you omit this?
• Baking Gel – Are you using 4% or 1%?
• Flour – Are you using more flour than necessary because your dough is too sticky to knead? Are you wasting dough that is sticking to your machinery and not going into your bread?

It is natural to worry about tweaking your original recipes that had been selling well for years. Wait! You want to save money and reduce costs now?

Many bakers have tried this successfully and achieve long term savings.

Replace your current baking gel with Ryoto Ester SP. Beep us if you need dosing recommendations!

Ryoto Ester SP is not called a magic gel by her baker fans for nothing.

With a dose that’s usually half that of other brands, Ryoto Ester SP baking gel can help you reduce the number of eggs, reduce the shortening needed, omit the use of improvers, reduce wastage of flour when you knead.

Here are some reduced eggs recipe to show how you can use Ryoto Ester SP to save costs!

Swiss Roll Reduced Egg Recipe with Ryoto Ester SP

Sponge Cake Reduced Egg Recipe with Ryoto Ester SP

3. How Long Can Your Bakes Last?

As a bakery with the need to outshine the new competitors. This survival tip is a differentiator for you to come up tops amongst the budding home bakers.

Why is this so important?

Most Stay Home Bakers do not have the experiences or scope to think about how long their beautiful bakes can last, in looks and taste.

Their journeys to upscale their bakes into bakery businesses are entirely focused on making tasty, fresh cakes that will be consumed within the same day of after.

Most consumers do manage to finish their artisan, well-crafted cakes within one take. However, there are another huge handful who may take their time to savour each slice over an entire week!

Or there are some who collect and deliver the cakes only a few days after to their friends.

This is why your bakery brand will sustain much longer if you take an effort to bake breads, kuehs and cakes that can stay moist, soft, and with vibrant natural colored cream with no cracks.

Most cream cakes start cracking visibly at Day 2-3.

You can read more about how to keep your cakes moist and fluffy even at 7 days chilled –> here.

4. Take Care Of Your Assets – Mixers and Bakers!

Other than ovens, mixers are one of the key essentials in all bakeries. Professional mixing equipment in a bakery are part of the business’s valued assets. Even if your bakery specialized in no-bake specialties that do not require ovens, it is almost impossible to do without a mixer.

The other important part of the bakery’s asset is the operation team. A bakery without an accountable team to produce consistent, reliable products is a stressful one. As one bakery owner puts it – ‘You can offer employees the sky in incentives, but they still come and go without any qualms.’

Focusing on the longevity of your 2 important assets – mixers and bakers’, is the key to survival in these challenging pandemic landscape.

How do you reduce wear and tear of your mixing equipment?

By common logic, using them less and putting less stress on the mixers will increase the machineries’ lifespan.

Surprising or not, using the right version of aerator baking gel may mean a big improvement in your mixer’s depreciating value.

Our in-house laboratory had proven that different brands of baking gel achieve the desired specific gravity for batter mixing in different time spans. Even when the dose of Ryoto Ester SP gel used is less than half of the comparison brand, mixing time of 25% is saved!

Ryoto Ester SP baking gel improves productivity at levels that supersedes other brands, see our baking sponge gel challenge video here to believe it with your own eyes.

In this case, the savings is compounded with less emulsifier used per batch, and higher productivity of batches per hour.

Mixing equipment is less stressed when mixing the dough with Ryoto Ester SP as the dough is more pliable, easier to knead and requires 30% less time than usual.

Stress reduction applies not only to machines but people as well.

(More) productive bakers are happier people.

Let’s talk about the other asset – your team. Imagine each batch of cake and dough batter is completed at a 30% faster rate, the rush to fulfill all orders will be reduced naturally.

In fact, there will be more time to work on the “artwork” for each bake.

As for the artwork, having a more stable batter will allow for more elaborate designs. Bakers often rush against the clock when they work with multi-colored batter and creams.

Watching the batter and creams melt whilst completing that floral piece is an excitement that bakers prefer not to have in their career!

With a choice to create a stable batter that can retain its aerated form of 3 hours at room temperature, bakers love the flexibility offered by Ryoto Ester SP.

Next is kneadability of dough. Give a baker a sticky dough, you can guarantee a day of tiredness.

Make it less sticky, the dough becomes easier to knead, whisk paddle easier to clean and you get a happier team smiling through their masks and eyes.

Time and its savings, is more valued than ever in this period of split-team operations.

To summarize, using the right brand of baking gel can protect your asset values and make your bakery a much happier workplace.

5. Survive Surely with Healthier Recipes, Quality Products

If you are not already marketing the healthier versions of your signature cakes, it is never too late to start.

The new normal will be a mass market of health-conscious consumers. Consumers who are sugar-phobic, protein-fixated, dairy-averse; consumers well-versed in the technical intricacies of being vegan, flexitarians, keto, diabetic-friendly, tooth-decay friendly, etc.

Less is more in this new era of recipe development. At the same time, consumers are treated to a new expansive range of tastes with exotic flowers and blends.

For a start, steer ahead of the competition with your existing line by making it healthier. Go with different types of oils (for their better profile), reduced eggs for less cholesterol, lower sugar or substitute cow’s milk with plant milks.

Very importantly, for every tweak in a recipe, ensure that quality and taste is not compromised!

For wholesale supplies where bakes need to be stored for a much longer period, use high-quality plant-based emulsifiers like Ryoto Ester SP baking gel, to increase the shelf quality and omit the need for chemical preservatives.

Rose-infused muffins using Ryoto Ester SP gel to blend the natural rose flavours

We understand your stress as a bakery owner. Drop us a note to see how your operations can be further maximized!