The Hummingbird Bakery uses vWork to manage delivery workflow

The Hummingbird Bakery built business a cupcake at a time

The vision behind the iconic The Hummingbird Bakery brand is simple – to share their love of authentic American-style baking primarily with its London-based customers. Since launching its first bakery and shop on Portobello Road in Notting Hill in 2004, it has since opened five more branches across London.

When it launched there was a gap in the market for American style baking – cupcakes, layer cakes, brownies, pies and cheesecakes. The company founder and Managing Director, Tarek Malouf, is adamant that cakes taste best when they’ve been freshly baked using exactly the same ingredients and techniques as those used in home baking. 

For this reason, each Hummingbird Bakery branch has its own kitchen and a team of expert bakers and cake decorators. This enables the bakery to bake to order and to only serve its customers cakes that have been freshly baked the very same day.

Today the business has 125 staff spread across the six branches. Operations Director, Colin Rendell manages all the bakeries, the Customer Care team, delivery drivers and IT requirements for the business.

Colin says: “When I joined the business eight years ago, vWork was already considered backbone software. The drivers would come into the branch each morning to collect the cakes for delivery and set off. vWork was used for delivery run planning, proof of delivery and delivery map view capability.”

More recently, Colin had been looking into ways to make the business operationally more efficient – and he could see one opportunity lay with how the delivery routes were set each day.

Making delivery routes a piece of cake with vWork

Since Hummingbird started to use vWork’s route optimization function, each Branch Manager quickly runs the routes each night for the following day. 

And Colin is pleased with the result: “I’ve got to say, it’s amazing and I wish we’d started using it earlier. Previously the drivers would arrive at work and then set their own delivery routes. But since our delivery window is any time between 10am and 6pm, there was room to improve the efficiency of them.” 

With vWork, it also means that the drivers are knocking on their first customer’s door at 10am each day – rather than spending the first hour of each day planning where they would go and then set off in the busy London traffic. And what’s more, the drivers were also really happy to have their routes set by vWork.

Refining The Hummingbird Bakery’s recipe for growth

Colin is always looking to the future – and is carefully fine tuning operations to ensure that the business is in the best shape it can be. 

Next on the list is to reduce the long 8-hour delivery windows – to give their customers more control over their day and to reduce the number of calls into the Customer Care Centre. Currently the Customer Care team uses the map view in vWork to help manage expectations when customers call in asking when they can expect their delivery. 

Knowing that vWork has the ability to automatically send alerts via email and SMS after the optimization has been run to inform customers when they expect to arrive the following day and then another alert can be sent when the driver is, say, 30 minutes away will be valuable. Colin anticipates that this will remove a lot of inbound calls to the Customer Care team.

Using vWork, Colin and The Hummingbird Bakery team are confident that they have a sweet recipe for growth.