From Running a Bakery to Building Software for Bakeries: The BakeIQ Story

If planning tomorrow’s production means checking orders in several places, updating a spreadsheet and answering questions only you can answer, you may have wondered whether there is a better way. For Tahner Friedley, co-founder of Fuzion Donuts in Edmonton, those everyday frustrations became the starting point for BakeIQ: software built from his experience of running a bakery.

His story explores how to make software for a bakery business, beginning with the problem it needs to solve. What started as a solution for Fuzion developed into a digital product he could offer to other bakery owners, creating the foundations of another business alongside the bakery.

For bakers exploring digital products, this broadens what it can mean to sell your knowledge. Alongside sharing recipes or teaching techniques, you may understand a recurring operational problem well enough to develop a useful tool. Tahner’s answers show how he began, what he learned from other bakeries and why the work extends beyond building the software.

How Running Fuzion Donuts Gave Tahner the Idea for a Digital Product

Tahner started Fuzion Donuts in Edmonton with a partner who brought baking expertise. His own strengths were business and operations. As the bakery grew, his work included planning production, managing ingredients and orders, coordinating staff and getting products to the stores.

That experience gave him a detailed understanding of how the bakery worked. He knew what information people needed before a shift could begin, how one order could change the production plan and where mistakes could happen when information was missing.

For an experienced bakery owner, much of this knowledge can feel like an ordinary part of the job. You may have spent years learning how to organise wholesale orders or turn a changing sales forecast into a workable production plan. Other bakery owners may struggle with those same tasks. If you can turn your approach into a tool that helps them manage the work, such as a planning spreadsheet or software, you could have a digital product they would pay to use. The knowledge you developed while running your bakery could then become the starting point for another source of income.

The Everyday Bakery Problems Behind BakeIQ

At Fuzion, the information needed to run the bakery was spread across spreadsheets, paper sheets, emails, text messages and Tahner’s memory. Before production could start, someone had to count finished stock, check orders, decide how much of each product was needed and calculate the doughs, fillings and glazes required.

Each task affected the next. A wholesale order arriving by email needed to find its way into the production plan. If it did not, it could be missed, even though someone in the business had received it.

“It wasn’t one dramatic moment; it was the repeated realization that the system depended too heavily on someone remembering and updating everything,” Tahner explains.

This gives other bakery owners a useful place to begin looking for ideas. Pay attention to jobs that repeatedly need checking, copying or explaining. A problem worth exploring might show up as a daily interruption, a recurring error or a task that only one person knows how to complete.

For example, if you regularly copy wholesale orders from messages into a spreadsheet and then calculate production quantities by hand, write down that whole process. Where does information get lost? Which step takes the most time? Understanding the specific difficulty will help you decide what a useful improvement needs to do.

Turning Bakery Operations Knowledge Into Software

Tahner wanted a system for Fuzion almost from the beginning, but initially could not build it. His starting aim was to solve the problems inside his own bakery. Once he had something working there, he began to see the possibility of helping other small bakeries with similar disconnected processes.

A digital product is something people access or use electronically. It could be a recipe ebook, a recorded class, a spreadsheet or a software tool. With software, your knowledge can be built into the way the tool works: the questions it asks, the calculations it performs and the information it gives the user.

For BakeIQ, that meant understanding how orders affect a production day, how finished products break down into recipes and how ingredients need to be counted. Those connections came from Tahner’s experience running Fuzion.

Think about a production-planning tool. An owner might enter the products and quantities required, and the tool could use the bakery’s recipes to work out what needs making. The value lies in turning those inputs into a plan the team can use. The bakery’s knowledge becomes part of how the tool helps someone complete the task.

This is also how an improvement within a bakery can become the basis of another business. Other owners may pay to use a tool that helps them solve a problem they recognise. Software is one possible format among several bakery revenue streams built around recipes, skills and knowledge. The right choice depends on the help your buyer needs and the work you are prepared to take on.

How AI Tools Helped Him Start Building BakeIQ

Tahner did not come from a traditional software-development background. He says new AI development tools made it possible to begin building an idea he had held for years. For him, those tools provided a way to begin putting his operational ideas into practice.

What he does make clear is where much of the difficulty lay: “The hard part was translating real bakery work into dependable software.”

Getting a tool to produce an answer is only part of the task. In a bakery, that answer has to make sense when an order changes, a recipe is adjusted or a member of staff needs to understand what to do. Testing needs to reflect those real situations, including the awkward ones that happen during a busy week.

Running Fuzion while building and testing BakeIQ has been demanding. It has also meant Tahner could see how the software behaved in daily bakery work and fix parts that did not work as intended.

If you are wondering how to make software for a bakery business, start by describing the task clearly before choosing a development tool. Write down what information goes in, what the user needs to get out and how you will check the result. Your bakery experience can help you define the problem, but dependable software still needs development, testing and ongoing care.

From an Internal Bakery Tool to a Product for Other Bakeries

Although the software was called BakeIQ from the beginning, Fuzion was its only user at first. Tahner and the team used it in daily operations, found bugs and corrected things that did not work. They then invited other bakeries to try it free of charge.

That next stage mattered because a system built around one bakery can reflect habits that other businesses do not share. A bakery supplying several shops may plan differently from one that mainly takes advance orders. The way owners organise recipes, record ingredients or assign work can vary too.

“We needed to learn how their bakeries operated, where our assumptions were wrong, and what features they needed,” Tahner says. Their feedback helped BakeIQ develop beyond Fuzion’s way of doing things.

This was part of testing the idea: finding out whether the product helped people outside the business where it began. Free testing can reveal whether people understand a tool, use it regularly and encounter problems. It does not, on its own, establish whether they will pay for it. That is another question to explore as the offer develops.

For your own idea, speak to owners who regularly deal with the task you want to improve. Ask them to describe how they handled it most recently, what went wrong and what they already use. You will learn more from a real example than from asking whether they like your software idea.

If you have a small working version, let a few relevant owners try it on a clearly agreed basis. Watch where they need help and ask what they would use again. Before investing in a much larger product, discuss a specific paid offer with a clear price and scope. Someone agreeing to pay is stronger evidence of buying interest than a compliment.

Why Selling Software Also Means Helping Customers Use It

Tahner describes a hands-on approach to setting up paying customers. Ingredients, recipes, products and production templates need to be entered correctly before BakeIQ can do its job. Simply giving an owner a login does not provide that foundation.

Imagine moving your bakery’s recipes into a new system. Even if the software works properly, the plan it produces will depend on the information entered. Someone may need help organising recipes, checking quantities and understanding how products connect to production. That setup is part of making the product useful.

“I’ve also learned that building software and helping someone successfully adopt it are two different jobs,” Tahner says.

For anyone considering software as a digital product, this affects both the offer and the workload. Decide what help a customer receives, how they will contact you and what happens when something stops working. The price needs to account for maintaining the software and delivering the support you promise, alongside the time and cost of building it.

A software business also needs a way to reach suitable buyers. The people who buy your baked goods may be different from the owners who need your software, so think about where those owners already go for advice. If you are exploring how to find the right people for your own offer, this guide to marketing digital products and building a relevant audience explains several possible starting points.

Where BakeIQ Is Now and What Tahner Is Building Towards

At the time of our interview, BakeIQ was running in Fuzion Donuts and Tahner had begun bringing other bakeries onto the system. His focus was on making the experience dependable and helping new customers complete their setup successfully.

The achievement he describes most proudly is practical: a member of staff can arrive for a shift, open the production plan on a tablet and see what needs to be made without waiting for him to reconstruct the day.

Ingredients, recipes, orders, purchasing and staff work are becoming parts of one operating system. That progress shows how bakery operations knowledge can be turned into a working digital product, while the wider business is still taking shape.

Tahner is careful about claims for other bakeries: “I don’t want to claim results for another bakery until they’ve had time to use it.” BakeIQ is still in the early stages of reaching other bakeries. The evidence so far comes from its use at Fuzion and the work of testing and setting up the product elsewhere; the longer-term commercial results are still to be established.

Bakery owners interested in exploring the product can learn more through the BakeIQ website.

Could Your Bakery Experience Become a Digital Product?

The opportunity in Tahner’s story began with work he already understood. Running a bakery had taught him how orders, ingredients, recipes and people needed to fit together. Building BakeIQ gave him a way to offer help with those tasks to other bakery owners.

You may have a different kind of knowledge: a reliable way to plan seasonal orders, organise a changing wholesale menu or manage a particular production task. The first question is whether other people have the same difficulty and would value help solving it. The product format can follow from what you learn.

If you want to explore software for bakeries, Tahner’s advice offers a practical starting point:

1. Choose one recurring frustration. Pick a task you can describe clearly, such as turning confirmed orders into a daily production list.
2. Write down how it works now. Include the information needed, the people involved and the points where mistakes or delays happen.
3. Test the smallest useful improvement. A basic spreadsheet or partly manual process may help you test the idea before developing a larger system.
4. Learn from other bakery owners. Let relevant people try the improvement, observe where their needs differ and discuss what a paid version would need to deliver.

These steps are a way to explore an opportunity, rather than a guarantee of a viable software business. As Tahner puts it, “solving a problem in your own bakery is a starting point, not proof that you understand every bakery.”

You do not need to begin with an entire bakery management system. Start with something you understand well and find out whether it can help someone else. That is the connection between running a bakery and creating a digital product: taking experience earned through daily work and turning it into a useful solution other people can buy.