Day-old Bread Becomes Value-added Product

Store: Nemenz IGA
Owner: Judy Gabriele
Location: Struthers, Ohio

Overview

Our store bakery makes a good deal of breads from scratch: pumpernickel, rye (seeded and seedless), rolls, hamburger buns, etc. But by far the most popular favorite is the $.99 Italian bread made fresh daily and sold in 1 lb loaves. We make an average of 600 loaves each day to sell in our store and to send out to some local restaurants and other stores.

The big ticket comes with finding new uses for the stale or day-old bread. We don’t reduce it in store, because it’s already an inexpensive product and we also sell a heavier, Sicilian-style Italian bread for $1.99, which is also popular. So we usually take the day-old breads and grind some into bread crumbs to use in our hot foods department, and donate the rest to a local church. Last year, we decided to try something new for Thanksgiving: turning stale bread into bread cubes for holiday stuffing. On the first try we sold 200 bags. This season we did more than 300 bags.

By the Numbers

• 600 Italian loaves baked daily
• 26 cents: cost of materials and labor per loaf
• $3.49: price tag on bags of bread cubes for stuffing
• $3.15: pure profit made per bag of bread cubes
• $945 (profits on bread cubes over the Thanksgiving holiday)

WHY IT WORKS

For Our Shoppers

The fresh bread brings people into the store. Customers like having unseasoned, homemade bread cubes for their holiday stuffing (without having to make it themselves!).

For Our Store

We’ve turned bread that we can’t sell into a new, value-added product, with little effort required. We’ll definitely do it again next year!

Tactics

The bread cubes were easy to make:

1. We put each loaf through the slicer twice: First the normal way, then gathered the pieces and ran them through in the opposite direction.
2. Then bag up the cubes and price it. Done!