Giving the World its Daily Bread is a Tough Logistics Challenge
Next time you enjoy a delicious slice of fresh-baked bread think of Maurice Sinclair!
He has recently returned to Australia from an extensive tour of South-East Asia and of Europe where he has been studying the latest practices in the distribution of fast-moving consumer goods with special emphasis on bakeries.
His tour followed the completion of a four-year project in which George Weston Foods had commissioned Maurice’s consultancy, Logistics Bureau, to review its Australian distribution operations.
The review identified many millions of dollars’ worth of cost-saving opportunities and service improvements.
It also created a long-term strategy that affected everything in the supply line from the profitability of individual products, through bread room operations, even to examining running costs of individual delivery vehicles.
This aspect was part of a successful strategy by Brian Robinson, GWF’s chief executive, to revitalize the Tip Top bread company’s distribution operations and to employ outside strategic advice to help.
Logistics Bureau is a leading international consultancy with offices in Australia, South Africa, Thailand, and London, and Maurice Sinclair is its specialist on time-sensitive FMCGs.
Outlining the case history of the operation Maurice says: “Distribution is a major driver of manufacturing efficiency and once you understand its role in fresh food you know you can’t afford to get it wrong.”
Here are Some of his Observations on the GWF Australian Assignment
The first thing to know is that bread is one of the world’s toughest distribution challenges.
GWF dispatches hundreds of thousands of loaves daily to several thousand sales outlets with each outlet having two sales peaks – one to take advantage of the 8 – 10 morning peak sale time, the other to serve the 4 – 7 afternoon-evening demand.
So while other supply chains think in terms of weeks and months a big baker has to think in terms of hours and minutes. This task is compounded by the large reverse logistics effort required due to the fact that bread is generally sold to major supermarkets on a sale or return basis. Plus it is sold in crates that stack on to dollies that also require a return to the bakery!
Research shows that empty shelves mean lower sales; so grocery category managers always aim to have their shelves fully stocked at and during peak demand periods – an interesting problem for merchandisers when you remember that bread demand is compressed into these two daily time slots!
So supplying enough bread to fill shelves is a critical tactic in the overall strategy.
Bread distribution is, in fact, a supply rather than a demand function given the requirement to ship fresh products daily to a one-day marketing life span and the closeness of production function to distribution activity.
The key to getting the baking strategy right is being able to match volume and variety to demand. Distribution plays an integral role in the success of this objective; however, there are still many other variables affecting demand, such as weather, promotional activity in the market, and so on.
If it all seems obvious now that is because of the amount of careful research that went into assessing the situation in the first place.
People have been baking bread for thousands of years and GWF has long been up there with the biggest and best of them. So finding something new needed research that embraced the entire supply including the financial impact to shareholders of problem areas. The involvement of GWF’s senior management team was critical to the project’s success.
Logistics Bureau’s advisors worked very closely with Brian Robinson’s team driven to deliver a well-accepted change management program. Before elaborating on that, we’d like to remind you briefly that we’ll be glad to work with your team too, if, say, you’d like to boost the performance of your perishables supply chain.
To Talk About Improving your Supply Chain Performance
So, to return to GWF case, we began by holding a series of supply-chain workshops to identify problems and issues. As a combined team we then grouped what we discovered into themes that produced the strategy that has proven to be commercially successful.
In assessing the impact of distribution costs on profitability in the light of these themes we found that the change management focus was on:
- Cost to serve various customers and channels
- Stock item profitability
- Profitability of different customer types.
- Distribution channels such as retail, route, industrial, food services
- Fleet maintenance approach
- Costs of transferring product between plants to consolidate orders.
Analysis of the different customer types and the relative distribution issues associated with each, helped us articulate the cost-to-serve improvement opportunities.
The type of distribution method used partly determines the cost to serve. Customers serviced by vendors (similar to van salesmen) incur a different cost than those serviced by company drivers. Vendor and company vehicles service route and bulk customers. As a rule of thumb the higher volume a customer receives the lower the unit cost of distribution.
The mix of bulk and route combined with the density of customers in a given region is what determines the speed and number of deliveries by the vehicles. So an inner-city driver with few stops but many deliveries per stop should show higher productivity than delivery to, say, the outer west where there are more kilometers between stops and fewer deliveries per stop.
Customer size is also important. Consider a corner store order for, say, 10 units worth $20 to the baker. If the delivery truck stops for 10 minutes for 10 units the cost to deliver = stopping time + kilometers between drops + fixed asset costs + bread room handling costs, etc, e.g. if the truck is worth $60/hour the stop costs $10 for only $20 in sales or a stop cost of $1 per unit of bread. Build-in all the other cost aspects and it is possible to get a negative return
Contrast all that with a grocery customer who may take 1000 units a drop during a 20-minute stop. Then the delivery stop costs $20 but brings in $2000 and costs only around 2 cents per unit per stop.
Optimizing delivery aspects will inevitably flow on to other areas such as merchandisers as they are generally scheduled to service the big stores after the delivery is made.
It also impacts on manufacturing because if the time window is changed for a given group of customers then the distribution changes, the merchandising changes, as does the timing of production for those affected customers.
In the long run, this detailed issues-based approach successfully helped to re-align a large and complex supply chain. Above all, it produced improvements that included:
- Optimized routes
- More profitable range management
- Fleet optimization
- Reduced internal transfer cost.
- Reduced returns and sales waste
Results speak for themselves and this project is providing long-term dollar benefits and Brian Robinson’s team continues to be GWF’s most profitable division.
What to do Next
If you are interested in Bread Supply Chain Consulting, or in lifting your perishable’s supply chain to higher levels of performance, please feel free to contact Logistics Bureau on the details below. We’ll be very happy to help.
To Talk About Improving your Supply Chain Performance
Studying a similar challenge of fresh bread delivery in santiago chile
Interesting. What are some of the major challenges?
Managing the crates, they break, are not easy to maintain clean, there are always crates missing, something needs to be improved.
Yes, managing the crates is always difficult. Same in the Milk industry. It costs $millions a year to replace them……..
In your experience, which is the best crate to be used, which characterisitcs shall we look for,
I’m not really an expert in Bread crates, sorry. Most companies in Australia use a very basic design like this.
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Customized-bread-plastic-mesh-crate-for_60767821685.html
You could look for Viscount or Mackies both based in Australia to produce and supply, I’m sure you’ll get cheaper on Ali baba as suggested here. For cleaning, you really need a semi crate wash solution, there are many producers if these. First step would be looking at Newsmith who are based in England and New Zealand, get an idea of what you want then look local to Chile. Depending on what you want to spend, you can get units that clean and dry1000 crates an hour, and feed direct onto auto packing lines.
Hi Rob. Baking bread in one facility and transporting it to another facility to be packaged and distributed ,although only 10 minute distance by truck,,what are the major concerns as far as damage , vibration ( if not cooled enough)
Overhandling etc
Hi. Indeed. I’ve never heard of baking in one facility and packing in another. Bread normally comes directly from baking to the ‘bread room’ for packaging.
Hi Rob was trying to work out the supply chain cost for one loaf of bread in India vis-a-vis Australia or other countries. Would like to known if you can help me with some data in that area.
Sandeep
Sorry I don’t. Maybe you could work it out on a % of sales basis?
Hi
I am a writing my bachelor project and I found a company(warehouse) to write my bachelor with. They want to transport bread to their own shops instead of their bread supplier because want to lower the cost of their bread distribution . The company has no experience in bread storage and distribution. But they have experience in the storage and distribution of fruits and vegetables.
I am currently studying Value chain management and i would like to ask what are the challenges and mistakes to avoid when storaging and distributing bread?
I am thinking that the areas to take a look at can be the inventory, the demand and forecast.
Do you have any other suggestions ?
Bread is a very hard product to distribute. It is ‘made’ in the bakery, goes direct from being baked to the ‘bread room’ for slicing and bagging, where it waits for just a few hours before being delivered to the shops. There is no ‘storage’ or warehousing function normally for fresh bread. For froze or part baked bread, there would be a storage/warehousing activity but not for fresh. Fresh bread is sold the day it is baked. And has a very short shelf life.
Hi Rob. Interesting to read this, a lot seems to have changed in the market for both GWF and Goodman Fielder since you wrote this in 2003, very evident in Australasia.
Bread sales, especially loaf and buns/rolls, are flat to declining with the end user wanting new and exciting – I’ll add in dietary desires and needs like gluten free and cultural food differences like flat breads -and it seems to be a real race to the bottom for the big producers with the duopoly demanding more and paying less at the same time as getting the plant bakeries to supply “look alike” products of their higher end lines.
Conversely, in SE Asia, Malaysia, Indonesia, loaf bread and buns has been through and seems to continue to go though a real renaissance, and although these countries favour the American higher sugar style of bread the daily fresh model seems to keep going strong.
Indeed a very changing market! Of course now, in early 2021, we are all used to home baked bread! We haven’t bought ‘shop bread’ for over a year.