Donut Shop Closing Checklist

Try these steps in order - markdown, then staff or donation, then waste - and bin all filled lines regardless. Cutting prices is worth doing properly: pricing that changes by time of day reduced planned waste by 20.82% compared with the best fixed-price plan in one multi-store study, while profit for that category still rose 2.88%. How much this matters shows up in the same chain, where roughly one-third of artisanal baked bread was wasted, and in Australia, where 12–20% of bread is returned to manufacturers in most states, compared with 2–6% where sale-and-return is restricted.

Start at 5% of sales, tracked weekly - that is the default this pack ships, and the discipline is reviewing the number every week rather than at year end. There is no published end-of-day unsold benchmark for donut retail specifically, so your own weekly log is what moves the target after that.

Three things: unsold units by item and by batch with a reason, sell-outs with the hour they happened, and the closing fryer TPM reading with the cycle count. Unsold-by-batch is what fixes over-production, sell-out hours are lost sales you otherwise never see, and the oil log is what makes your change interval predictable instead of a guess. Forecast-led production built on exactly this data was reported to cut bakery returns by an average 30% for users of one machine-learning forecasting service - a figure reported by the company that sells it, so treat it as a rough guide, not a guaranteed outcome.