Driving data adoption at Milk Bar

Building a data-driven desserts business with Looker

This post is adapted from an article I wrote for Looker about increasing data literacy and usage at Milk Bar.

“Wait, why does a bakery need a data engineer?” I get that a lot. I’m a data team of one at Milk Bar, the popular dessert brand by chef Christina Tosi, of Chef’s Table and MasterChef fame. In addition to sampling literally every cake, cookie, or truffle that our R&D team sends over to our office, I’m responsible for wrangling information across our omni-channel business. Like any modern retail company, we rely on strong business intelligence and a data-driven culture to open new stores, launch new products, streamline operations, and unify our customer experience online and in store.

Looker allows my colleagues to engage with the ever-growing pool of data generated by our business. Every week at Milk Bar, our leaders discuss a scheduled performance report on the health of our company, store managers receive updates on the previous day of sales, our demand planner pulls sales volumes for forecasting, and our marketers run various analyses to guide their spend. I’m proud to say that about 75% of our 30 users are actively using Looker in a given week.