Work Neighbourhood bakery

Hearth & Crumb

A bakery selling out by 10am, losing pre-orders across texts, DMs and a phone nobody could answer mid-bake.

HEARTH & CRUMB
Client
Hearth & Crumb
Trade
Neighbourhood bakery
Place
Portland, OR
Year
2026
On the order
Pre-order automation · Daily bake-list sync · Sold-out automation
Runs on
Square · Make · Twilio SMS
The takeaway
Pre-orders run themselves — a third of weekday bakes, zero re-keying

The brief

Hearth & Crumb sold out of sourdough by mid-morning six days a week. Orders came in three places at once — texts to Ana’s phone, Instagram DMs, and calls she couldn’t take with her hands in dough — and she was losing a few every day in the shuffle. She didn’t want an app or a rebuild. She wanted the orders to stop slipping through her fingers.

The map

We spent a morning watching the counter and found the real leak: every order was being written down twice, and the phone rang most in the exact hour nobody could pick it up. So we automated the intake first, the bake list second, and left the sourdough to Ana.

The build

Orders from every channel — web, text, the answered phone — now land as one kitchen ticket that prints before the ovens are hot. Pre-orders run through Square, cut off automatically at 8pm, and the day’s bake list syncs from Ana’s phone to the shopfront in a tap. The moment the case is empty, the site flips to “sold out” on its own — because the only thing worse than a missed loaf is a promised one that isn’t there.

The result

Pre-orders took over about a third of weekday production within two months, and not one of them is typed in by hand anymore. Less waste, calmer mornings, and a phone that no longer rings during the rush — it texts back instead.

Next door Kowalski & Sons Plumbing & heating · Buffalo, NY