Many bakeries don’t choose to become both retail and wholesale businesses—it just happens.
A café down the street asks if you can supply pastries. A local grocery wants your bread. An event planner wants consistent pricing for recurring orders. Before you know it, you’re juggling two very different sales models inside one bakery.
Selling to both retail and wholesale can be profitable but only if your systems can handle the complexity. Otherwise, the cracks show up fast.
Below are the most common challenges bakeries face when running both sides of the business, along with practical ways to solve them.
The challenge:
The croissant is the same croissant—but the pricing is not.
Wholesale pricing often varies by:
Individual customer
Customer type (coffee shop vs. grocery vs. event planner)
Volume commitments
Contracted pricing agreements
Trying to manage this with spreadsheets, handwritten notes, or “we just remember” eventually leads to mistakes—especially when staff changes or pricing updates.
The solution:
Bakeries need pricing that can flex by customer and by customer type, without creating duplicate products or confusion at the point of sale. Pricing should live with the customer account—not in someone’s head.
The challenge:
Retail customers usually order with set lead times.
Wholesale customers often don’t have that luxury.
Wholesale clients are running demand-based businesses themselves and may need:
Shorter lead times
Standing or recurring orders
Last-minute quantity adjustments
If wholesale orders are handled “off to the side,” it becomes difficult to protect production capacity while still being flexible.
The solution:
A shared order management system that supports different ordering rules by customer type—while still feeding one production schedule—allows bakeries to stay responsive without chaos.
The challenge:
Retail is often pickup-based.
Wholesale frequently involves delivery—and delivery isn’t just “drop it off.”
You may need:
Delivery routes
Fees that vary by location
Delivery days by customer
Packing lists organized by stop
Clear separation between pickup and delivery orders
Without structured delivery tools, mistakes happen at the packing table—not at the order entry screen.
The solution:
Delivery needs to be baked into the workflow, with:
Delivery-based fulfillment views
Location-specific fees
Packing and delivery lists
This allows packers and drivers to work efficiently without interpreting handwritten notes.
The challenge:
Retail customers pay at the counter.
Wholesale customers expect invoices, statements, and sometimes net terms.
On top of that, many wholesale businesses have:
Multiple contacts
Multiple delivery locations
One master billing account
Manually reconciling this—or tracking who owes what—takes time away from running the bakery.
The solution:
Wholesale requires true account-based billing, including:
Invoicing tied to orders
Statements by account
Payments applied at the account level
Multiple contacts and delivery locations under one business
When billing is clean, relationships stay strong.
The challenge:
Your bakers and decorators don’t care who the product is for—they care about counts and clarity.
Problems arise when:
Retail and wholesale orders live in different systems
Production totals don’t reconcile
Decorators get conflicting tickets
This leads to overproduction, shortages, or last-minute scrambles.
The solution:
Production should see one consolidated list:
Total quantities by product
Decoration tickets only when decoration is required
No distinction between retail or wholesale at the production level
The complexity belongs in the system—not on the production floor.
The challenge:
While production needs simplicity, packers need specificity.
They need to know:
Which orders are wholesale vs. retail
Which are delivery vs. pickup
How orders should be grouped
What goes on each truck or counter
Without clear fulfillment views, mistakes happen right before the product leaves the building.
The solution:
Fulfillment tools should allow staff to:
Filter by customer type
Filter by fulfillment method
Generate packing and delivery reports that match real workflows
This keeps the front-of-house and back-of-house aligned.
The challenge:
Wholesale customers don’t want to text orders, email PDFs, or wait for callbacks.
They expect to:
Place orders themselves
Set recurring orders
View order history
Access invoices
Pay online
If they can’t, your team becomes the bottleneck.
The solution:
A wholesale ordering portal gives customers independence—while keeping everything tied into the same order and reporting system used for retail.
Selling to both retail and wholesale isn’t the problem.
The problem is trying to run two business models without systems designed to connect them.
When pricing, ordering, production, fulfillment, and billing all live in one integrated workflow:
Teams work with confidence
Errors drop
Wholesale relationships strengthen
Owners regain visibility and control
The goal isn’t to add complexity—it’s to contain it, so your bakery can grow without burning out the people who make it run.
BakeSmart is bakery software built by bakery people for bakery life! We'd love to hear about your operation and see if we can help!