Tuesday is not Saturday

Most bakeries bake roughly the same amounts Monday through Friday. The ovens are the same, the routine is the same, the trays are the same. The customers are not.

What the data says

Before building our forecasting models, we benchmarked several years of daily sales from five bakeries, 216 products in total. The clearest pattern in that data was not weather, not season, not holidays. It was the day of the week. For many products, the gap between the best weekday and the slowest one was bigger than any weather effect we could measure.

The tricky part: the pattern is different for every product. Daily staples barely move. Weekend treats swing hard. A few products sell better midweek than on Saturday, which usually means office orders. You cannot tell which is which from behind the counter, because on any single Tuesday the noise drowns out the signal.

Two weeks of notes

You do not need years of data to see the shape. Two weeks is enough for a first look, because each weekday appears twice. Write down what you baked and what was left, or when it sold out. A minute at closing time.

This is exactly how MakeBright starts. New cafés begin in what we call shadow mode: you change nothing about how you bake, you just log your day. After about two weeks the app puts its suggestions next to what actually happened, and you decide whether to trust it. Some patterns it finds you will recognise instantly. The ones you do not recognise are the reason to look.

Either way, on a notebook or in an app: stop baking Tuesday like it is Saturday.