A bakery runs on a rule the rest of food service would find alarming: the plan is to run out. You bake a number, you sell the number, and if there is anything left at four you baked too much. Every tool built for restaurants assumes the opposite.

Selling out is the product

Which means the menu is wrong within an hour of opening and stays wrong all day. The sourdough goes at nine, the almond croissants at half ten, and by noon a third of what is written down is gone.

Marking things off as they go is the whole job. It takes a second at the counter and it stops the conversation that eats your morning — the one where somebody asks for the thing in the photograph that sold out before they parked.

The four questions

• Does it have nuts.
• Is there dairy in it.
• Is it vegan.
• What time do you bake more.

Three of those four belong on the item and never have to be asked. Put them there once and the person on the counter gets their morning back.

Tomorrow is a different menu

Most bakeries bake on a rota — rye on Thursdays, the fruit loaf at the weekend. Guests learn the rota slowly and ask about it constantly. Writing which day a thing appears is a sentence on the item and it turns a question into a plan.

Preorders without a system

The Saturday morning queue is mostly people collecting things they should have been able to reserve. You do not need an ordering platform for this. A code on the counter, an order that lands on a screen in the back with a name and a pickup time, and the till does what it always did.

The photo problem

Bakery photographs sell better than any description, and they cause more disappointment than any other category, because the picture is of a perfect one and the last one in the case is not. Use photographs for the things you make every single day, and words for the things that change.

A bakery menu is a list of what is still here. Anything that cannot be crossed off in a second is the wrong list.