Bakery, whether it is bought in, or produced in the store is consistently an area of high loss and waste, often accounting for up to 40% of all the surplus food in any one supermarket. It has been said in previous working group meetings that you cannot "donate your way out" of bakery waste problem, so the priority should be prevention.

Causes of surplus and loss include wrong (over) production planning quantities, over and under delivery quantities from external vendors, complicated product look up (PLU) menus, and misaligned and conflicted KPI's across functions,. For example, the merchant / buyer incentives can lead to strategies on range, OSA targets, etc, that prioritise sales over loss / waste, while the stores may be targeted to prioritise loss reduction.

In July 2024, we heard from Albert Heijn, who shared the algorithms behind their new in store bakery plan, with Aldi sharing the challenges of selling in-store bakery at the self-checkout.

In this, our annual update, we will hear from the retailers in the group, both about the current problems they are facing into on managing bakery losses, but also some of their new ways of thinking, with new production planning systems and approaches, new PLU thinking (layout, etc), new product recognition to reduce errors, smart bakery systems using RFID and computer vision, plus other innovations that can grow bakery sales and at the same time, reduce waste & loss.

This meeting is for retailers, brand owners and academics only.