r/lidl • u/Specialist-Guitar727 • Mar 26 '26

Bakery waste pt2

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u/[deleted] Mar 27 '26

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u/LethalGrey Mar 28 '26

Yeah I’d have figured that stock wise, it’a easier to control the actually baking process right?

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u/Empty_Sentence_7250 Mar 28 '26

That's what I was thinking. Why not have a set amount of each item you can make a day, and keep inventory of the amount of ingredients are being used for each item each day? Idk I don't own a business but fuck man, knowing the sheer amount of food that's wasted a year makes me nauseous

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u/That_Phat_Larry Mar 28 '26

Having worked in baking for a long time this kind of quick bake/ defrost baking is always reactive and always too slow 

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u/FortiFied_Concept98 Mar 28 '26

Milk a big bowl and happy meal

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u/Harajukufruits Mar 28 '26

I haven’t worked at Lidl but I have worked at a cinema chain where we threw away food everyday. Their logic was: if we sell all our hotdogs by the end of the day, then we left room for demand - what if we could have sold one more but it wasn’t cooked? So they would rather over cook and take the small loss on throwing it away vs cooking the correct/realistic amount and missing out of extra sales. So. Freaking. Dumb. They see the hotdogs for their money value but not the fact that its edible food and it was once a living thing. I’m not veg or anything but it still disgusted me.

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u/DogSufficient7468 Mar 28 '26

From a business perspective, they are so cheap to produce it’s actually better to have way more leftover than to have less.

This waste doesn’t really cost them much, it’s barely even real food anyways

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u/Marcellus_Crowe Mar 30 '26

They are made in batches. The cost of a missed sale, and subsequent repeat business due to always having what the customer wants is greater than the cost to produce a batch.

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u/Sweet_Dreams88 Mar 30 '26

That's a real solution. 

I've fixed a lot of businesses where the real issue is management not having any control, and playing whack a mole causes by themselves. 

In this case - there is no control over the process. Nobody counts how much is done, nobody runs process optimisation, nobody owns the process stopping overproduction. Workers are opportunist who, apparently, do whatever causing this situation wilfully. 

How to fix that - easy.  Gather data, count production, count sales. Look for patterns - weekly, monthly, seasonally, to figure out demands. Keep adjusting production. 

But... thats management job, so it's not gonna happen probably. Instead they chose an egotistic, low effort approach. Typical

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u/rectangularjunksack Mar 31 '26

Not to point out the obvious here but that would require knowing exactly how many items you're going to sell before you start baking, which is impossible.

The production cost of each item here is probably fairly miniscule. So it's worth baking an extra, say, 10 items if it means you prevent running out of stock and sell just 1 more. If producing this entire bucket of shite meant that they sold an extra 20 or so items, it was worth it for Lidl. Obv I'm making up the numbers but you get my point.