Built for the dual-track economics of retail bakery and wholesale bakery — display-case rotation, custom-order deposits, batch production scheduling, and the per-item yield math that turns a $1,800 wedding-cake order into clean margin.
Average retail ticket
Walk-in customer, pastry + coffee. Custom orders run $50–$2,500+.
Typical wholesale revenue share
Bakeries with B2B accounts. Higher contribution stability than retail-only.
Target food cost
Lower than restaurant-foodservice; ingredient cost on bread and pastry is well-understood.
A bakery's POS handles two distinct workflows: walk-in retail (croissants, cookies, coffee) and custom orders (wedding cakes, corporate platters, birthday cakes with deposits and pickup dates). Katalyst handles both without forcing one to compromise for the other.
Morning pastries, afternoon discount, end-of-day clearance — automated price tiers by daypart prevent waste and capture the discount margin without manual override.
Take a 50% deposit on a $2,200 wedding cake; remainder due on pickup. Deposit tracked separately from retail revenue, applied automatically when the final ticket is rung.
Custom orders flagged for production 1–3 days ahead by lead time. Bakers see daily prep prompts; nothing slips through because the system surfaces tomorrow's commitments today.
Gluten-free, nut-free, dairy-free, vegan — tags per item drive both display-case labelling and custom-order communication.
Wholesale bakeries supplying cafes, restaurants, and grocery stores need a different operating model: net-30 invoicing, recurring orders, batch-level production planning. Katalyst supports wholesale alongside retail in a single platform.
B2B accounts with net-30 terms, recurring order templates, and invoice export to QuickBooks. Wholesale revenue separated from retail in reports.
Recipes drive ingredient deduction at batch level — bake 60 baguettes, system deducts the flour/water/salt against inventory automatically.
Calendar view of upcoming wholesale deliveries, custom-order pickups, and standing retail prep. Production manager sees the full week from one screen.
Inventory tracking that handles cut-and-portion items — slab cakes sold by the slice or as wholes, sourdough loaves sold whole or sliced — without the math breaking.
A retail-only bakery is one of the hardest restaurant-adjacent businesses to scale. Average ticket is $8–14 per walk-in customer; even at 200 transactions per day, daily revenue is $1,600–$2,800. After labour (high for bakery — production starts at 3am for a 7am open) and ingredient cost, retail-only net margins typically land at 4–9%. Sustainable, but tight.
Wholesale accounts change the math. A single restaurant client ordering 30 baguettes daily at $4.50 each is $135/day, $4,000/month, $48,000/year from a single account with zero retail labour overhead beyond delivery. Ten wholesale accounts of that size is $480K of annual revenue at significantly better margin than the equivalent retail volume. The bakery operators who scale past the $1M/year mark almost always do it through a mix: 60–70% retail, 30–40% wholesale, with wholesale supplying margin stability and retail providing brand and walk-in volume.
Custom orders are the third leg. A $1,800 wedding cake order at 65% margin contributes $1,170 to the bakery's bottom line — equivalent to about 150 walk-in transactions. The operational requirement: a deposit structure that protects against cancellation (typical: 25–50% on booking, non-refundable inside 7 days), lead-time discipline so production capacity is committed deliberately rather than ad-hoc, and the back-office workflow to schedule pickup dates and surface them to the production team without manual sticky-note tracking.
Daypart and waste management decide retail-side margin. A bakery that doesn't aggressively mark down end-of-day inventory loses 8–15% of potential revenue to the dumpster every night. Automated daypart pricing (morning full price, afternoon 25% off, last 90 minutes 50% off) recovers most of that loss as discounted-but-real revenue while reducing waste. Operators that try to manage daypart pricing manually usually default to throwing things out; operators with system-enforced daypart pricing capture the margin reliably.
Concrete examples of how bakery operators use Katalyst in the real workflows their concept actually runs on.
Bride orders $2,400 three-tier cake, pickup Saturday 14 days out. POS takes 50% deposit ($1,200) on the spot, schedules production for Thursday/Friday, flags pickup on the production calendar. Saturday morning, baker sees the order in the day's prep brief; the bride picks up at 11am and the remaining $1,200 rings against the deposit automatically.
Local restaurant orders 30 baguettes daily, billed net-30. Recurring order template fires automatically each morning at 4am; baker sees the line on the day's production sheet; delivery driver picks up at 6am and drops at the restaurant by 7am. Monthly invoice for $4,050 generated automatically at month-end, exported to QuickBooks.
4pm — daypart pricing kicks in. Pastries marked down 25%. 5:30pm — second tier, 50% off. The system surfaces the deal to walk-ins via in-store digital signage and the loyalty app. By 7pm close, the case is 90% cleared; revenue captured on items that would otherwise be waste.
Most POS vendors quote a bundled processing rate and hope you don't read the statements. Send us yours — we'll show you the line-item difference Katalyst Payments would make on the same volume. No demo required first.
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Your last 3 months of merchant statements
Or just your effective rate and monthly volume — we'll work with what you have.
We map the same volume onto Katalyst Payments
Interchange-plus pricing, no bundled markup, no surprise tier shifts.
You see the exact monthly + annual difference
Average client saves $55K+/year. We show you the math before you commit to anything.
Katalyst was built in 2015 by restaurateurs Dan Roland, Cole Dillon, and Scott Bleczinski — operators of a Massachusetts restaurant portfolio worth $15M+. Every feature exists because we needed it in our own dining rooms first.
Read our storySaved per year, on average
Increase in guest count
Increase in revenue
KPIs tracked
Yes. Wholesale accounts are configured as B2B customers with their own pricing, payment terms (net-30 typical), and recurring order templates. Wholesale orders flow into production planning alongside retail. End-of-month invoicing for wholesale runs automatically; retail revenue rings ticket-by-ticket. Reports separate the two channels so you can see margin and growth per channel.
Custom orders are placed against a pickup date with a configurable deposit percentage (commonly 25–50%, sometimes 100% on high-value or short-lead orders). The deposit rings to a deferred-revenue account; the remaining balance is captured automatically when the order is picked up. Production calendar surfaces upcoming custom orders by lead time so bakers see Thursday's prep on Tuesday morning, not Thursday at 6am.
Recipes define ingredient yield per batch. When you bake 60 baguettes against the baguette recipe, the system deducts the corresponding flour, water, salt, and yeast from inventory automatically. This is the only way to maintain accurate ingredient counts in a bakery; manual inventory deduction at this granularity is impractical.
Configure 2–3 daypart tiers per item (morning full price, afternoon 25% off, last 90 minutes 50% off). The POS automatically applies the tier price by time of day; staff don't have to remember to mark items down. Display the discount on the customer-facing screen so the markdown is visible. Most bakeries recover 60–80% of waste-bound revenue this way without staff effort.
A 30-minute walkthrough of Katalyst tuned to your concept.
