One oven, two margins
The counter earns more per croissant; wholesale earns more per hour of oven time it fills. Retail carries the storefront — rent, counter staff, the tray that does not sell — while a standing wholesale order bakes into capacity the counter was not using and sells itself every week. Neither number appears on a blended income statement, so the first thing our Fractional CFO engagement builds is a monthly view with the two lines separated: revenue, ingredients, production labour and delivery for each.
The deciding metric is contribution per oven-hour, because the oven, not the till, sets the ceiling on a bakery's output. A wholesale account priced below retail is fine when it fills hours the counter cannot use; the same account is a slow leak when it crowds retail production out of the morning crunch. That is a scheduling fact the blended margin will never show you.
Recipe costs that move when butter does
Butter and flour prices move, and every move re-prices the croissant whether you notice or not. We keep recipe costs live: each product costed from current supplier invoices, captured through Dext as they arrive, so the margin report reflects what butter costs now rather than what it cost when the menu was printed.
Pricing then runs on a cadence instead of a crisis: counter prices reviewed on a schedule and reprinted when a cost threshold is crossed, wholesale price lists issued with a notice period and an adjustment clause, so a dairy move does not sit on your margin for a year because the contract forgot it could happen. Waste closes the loop — stales tracked as a share of production, by product — since a line that consistently over-bakes has a different real margin than its recipe card claims.
Labour spent before sunrise, measured by daypart
Bakery labour splits into two different costs. Production hours — the 4 a.m. bake — belong in product cost, where they change the wholesale floor price and the keep-or-drop math on every line. Counter hours are a service cost, scheduled against the sales curve: sales per labour-hour by daypart is the number, and it usually shows a morning rush that could carry another body and a mid-afternoon that cannot justify the two it has.
Ontario's employment rules shape the schedule too. The three-hour rule means a short call-in shift still costs three hours of pay, so patching a rush with ninety-minute shifts is pricier than it looks, and bakers drifting past the 44-hour line during a big wholesale December is often the true cost of that December. We build those effects into the schedule template once, instead of meeting them in every payroll as a surprise.
Wholesale terms written on purpose
Every account should clear a floor price built from ingredients at current cost, production labour, packaging, a per-stop delivery charge and a share of fixed costs — plus a minimum order per delivery, because a small drop across the city loses money in the van before anyone counts the bread. Payment terms are part of the price: an account on net 30 that pays in 45 is borrowing from you, and the aging decides which accounts get a new rate, a deposit or a goodbye.
Once a year the whole list gets ranked by contribution after delivery costs and stales. The bottom accounts get repriced or released — the least dramatic margin improvement available to any bakery, and the one most owners never take.
The second-location question, answered three ways
Growth for a café-bakery is rarely a yes-or-no decision; it is a choice among three paths with very different capital and risk:
| Path | Capital and fixed cost | What it depends on |
|---|---|---|
| Second full bakery-café | Heaviest — hood, gas, venting and ovens make this the priciest build-out on the strip | A manager you trust and a site that can repeat the first shop's traffic |
| Satellite counter fed from the existing ovens | Light build-out, no production kitchen | Spare oven capacity and a delivery run short enough to protect freshness |
| Deeper wholesale instead | Near zero — the ovens and the van already exist | Accounts that clear the floor price; margin stays thinner per unit |
The satellite model wins more often than owners expect, because it grows the brand at a fraction of the fixed cost — but only when the oven math and the driving math both hold. When the answer is a build-out, the lender package matters as much as the site: Business Financing Advisory is led by a CPA who came out of banking and corporate finance, so the projections reach the bank in the shape banks approve. Engagements run monthly, sized for owner-run shops across the GTA, with the fee quoted in writing after a free 15-minute discovery call.
