Designing bread for online groceries
Everyone loves the smell of baked bread. It fills you with warmth and makes you want to rip off a chunk or cut a slice. Getting freshly baked bread to customers is a challenge. Fortunately, Picnic is fertile ground for challenging ideas. A diverse team of category managers, analysts and operational experts teamed up to design a pilot system to cut the time between baking and customer delivery.
From Baker to Customer
When delivering fresh products, Picnic has the upper hand. A just-in-time supply chain ensures that perishable goods arrive at our customers’ homes within a 12-hour cycle. For fruit, vegetables and meat this cycle is short enough to guarantee their freshness. But delivering fresh bread comes down to a matter of hours.
Bread-specific supply chain
We worked with a baker to develop a supply-chain that bypasses Picnic’s fulfilment centre and goes straight to our hubs, ready for delivery. This bread-specific supply chain allows us to decrease oven-to-door time by 6 hours. We can also better control external factors, such as temperature. Baked goods remain in an isolated environment between the baker and the customer. No-one opens the box, touches or drops the bread and the quality remains as good as the moment it was baked.
In conventional supermarkets, bread sits in storage and everything that isn’t sold by the end of the day is thrown out and wasted. With our system, the baker only bakes what our customers want, nothing more. This helps us work towards eliminating food waste every time we place an order.
Flink Bread: Designed for the customer
Flink
adjective [flɪŋk]
- Brave
- Solid
- A million miles from fragile
You feel the weight of a Flink loaf in your hands. It’s big and bulky. Dependable. Stone-baked in an artisan style, the taste declares a quality that you can’t dispute. After eating slices from a Flink loaf, you go the whole day full of energy.
To deliver quality bread, we designed a recipe that is adapted to Picnic’s distribution model and based on what we’ve learnt from customers over the past three years.
When do people eat bread?
Picnic’s customers receive deliveries in the afternoon, not the usual time to eat bread. So, people put it in the cupboard for next day, or buy a couple of loaves and freeze one for later. We explored and experimented with different ingredients to find a bread that matches these needs. Each element of our recipe plays a role to create the ultimate taste, even the day after delivery.
Ingredients
The project ran with six flavours of bread — white, maize, dark multigrain, light multiseed, spelt and wholegrain — and other than the basic ingredients of flour, yeast, salt and water, we tested different elements. We wanted to create a bread recipe that our customers would simply love, and as we take our customers seriously, that means quality.
Multigrain bread must meet certain quality standards. Many bakers look for the cheapest recipe to meet these requirements. That’s not Picnic’s style. Our multigrain bread has more than seven types of grains and seeds. We believe in rich recipes, and going above and beyond to exceed expectations.
But ingredients aren’t just thrown in. We are conscious of the role that each component plays. Take sunflower seeds. They are tasty, look good, rich in vitamins but also extremely oily. This keeps bread soft on the inside but when there are too many on the surface the crust softens over time. And a soggy crust is not the way to enjoy good bread.
During the pilot, the design of the bread went through many iterations, taste, time and temperature tests until we had a quality recipe adapted to our delivery strategy and customers’ needs.
Next stage: rolling Flink out to all customers
The pilot to deliver freshly baked bread to customers was a success. We had many positive responses from customers that were in our pilot group and requests for the bread from customers that weren’t.
Picnic is a place for creativity. When you have a good idea, you can implement and go with it and see if it works. We test and learn, look at the results, then test and learn again. There are incredible resources and expertise throughout the company to help find solutions to complex problems. And when those solutions are found we can roll it out across our entire customer base.
So soon, all of Picnic’s customers will have the chance to try a quality bread that’s designed for them!
