Food waste of any kind has financial, ethical, and environmental implications for individuals, businesses, and communities.
With the introduction of ‘Simpler Recycling’ legislation in the UK in 2025, there’s now a legal impact as well with a greater onus on bakeries and suppliers of bakery products to monitor their bakery waste management.
So, how to reduce waste in a bakery?
What is bakery wastage?
Bakery wastage can be broken down into two categories: bakery waste and bakery surplus.
Waste occurs when bakery quality control results in food products or ingredients being deemed unusable.
This could be because the ingredients or products are found to be sub-standard on key bakery quality control measures, or because the bakery products did not meet the brief of the customer (be that the final consumer or the retailer of bakery products).
Bakery surplus occurs when more bakery items are produced than sold.
Sound bakery waste management can minimise bakery surplus, and wastage at the source and is a principal factor in how to reduce waste in a bakery.
How much can waste cost bakery businesses?
It’s estimated that in the UK alone, 9.52 million tonnes of food is wasted each year, with bread accounting for 900,000 tonnes of that wastage at both production and consumer levels.
How much can waste cost bakery businesses? It’s not difficult for a bakery to monitor and quantify the financial cost of bakery waste on site.
What’s more difficult to quantify, is the cost to reputation and future sales if the bakery waste occurs further down the supply chain.
Add to that the cost of disposing of food waste and your bakery is losing in areas it does not need to.
Bakery waste management is crucial for improving the financial, environmental, social, and now legal impact of bakery quality control.
How to minimise bakery wastage
With so much at stake, bakeries need to be tackling how to reduce waste in a bakery.
While there are creative and valuable ways bakeries can redistribute bakery surplus, such as Too Good To Go, how much better to simply minimise bakery waste before it occurs.
Sound bakery waste management requires an understanding of where the wastage is coming from.
European studies suggest that the primary culprit of bakery wastage is in the ingredient phase of production (particularly the cultivation of wheat and rye).
Commercial bakery control then must involve the monitoring of quality of the ingredients going into every batch produced. No bakery wants to discover post bake, that their ingredients affected the quality of the bake.
Fortunately, bakers no longer have to rely solely on subjective sensory observations of ingredients and products for bakery quality control.
Imagine the difference to your commercial bakery control to have the on-site tools and expertise to analyse ingredients pre-bake including for moisture content, and contaminants ensuring you can receive quantifiable, objective data on that ingredient batch.
Follow that up with a test bake and your bakery has a ‘bread score’ breaking down the external features and internal structure of each sample.
Can you see how that level of objective measurement would improve bakery quality control and be a key driver in how to reduce waste in a bakery?
How C-Cell can help reduce bakery wastage
C-Cell puts that level of baking quality control into your business, giving you quantifiable data on which to make choices for every batch, improving quality, satisfaction, profitability, and minimising bakery wastage.
It’s an efficient, technological solution that’s user friendly, and a valued tool for ingredient analysis, test baking, flour milling, and research & development.
C-Cell baking quality analyser has a three-step process of taking an image, analysing, and quantifying the data.
Analysing ingredients against permissible contaminant levels with C-Cell helps reduce bakery wastage. It enables bakers and other bakery manufacturers to see how modifying certain ingredients will affect baking outcomes enabling them to refine and improve products during production.
Having objective real-time data in the hands of your bakers or research developers ensures any inconsistencies that could lead to a failed bake, or diminished quality, are identified early rather than once valuable resources have been wasted.
C-Cell takes commercial bakery control to new heights, enabling bakeries to concentrate on producing quality bakery products secure in the knowledge they have quantifiable data driving their bakery waste management.
Contact Calibre Control to learn more about baking quality control and analysis.