A few months ago I wrote about building a Fulfillment Planner as a Shopify Admin app — a tool born out of frustration that nothing on the Shopify App Store quite matched what a made-to-order micro bakery actually needs.
Since then I’ve kept building, and the app has grown into something I think is genuinely useful beyond just my own kitchen. This post covers what’s new.
If you missed the original post, the short version: I make sourdough to order, run a subscription model, and needed a way to plan production without spreadsheets and guesswork. Shopify doesn’t have great native tooling for this, so I built my own.
Why Shopify doesn’t work well for made-to-order production
Most Shopify fulfillment apps assume you’re picking items off a shelf. Made-to-order is different.
You need to know not just what to make, but when to start making it — and if your product involves any kind of multi-day process (fermentation, curing, ageing, or prep that happens the day before), you need that planned out well in advance.
Layer subscriptions on top — weekly regulars, variable cadences, customers who’ve been ordering the same thing every Thursday for months — and the complexity compounds quickly.
Most subscription apps tell you about recurring revenue. None of them tell you what to actually do on Tuesday morning.
That’s the gap this app is filling.
Subscription detection
Subscriptions are now a first-class part of the data model, with their own tab in the app.
More interestingly, the app can now analyse your existing Shopify order history and detect likely subscriptions automatically — regardless of which subscription app you’re using.
It works by applying a set of heuristics to historic orders: looking for the same customer, same product, and repeating patterns.
From this, it can surface:
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A probable day-of-week
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An estimated cadence
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A confidence score (a “strength” rating that tells you how reliable the detection is)
The key advantage is that it’s subscription app-agnostic.
Rather than integrating with any one provider, it works at the order level — meaning it’s compatible with any subscription app that creates orders with scheduled fulfilments in Shopify (which covers the vast majority of them).
With knowledge of subscriptions, the fulfillments view is able to show you projections of future fulfillments the systems expects to be placed before the orders are actually concrete. And pnce a prepaid subscription order is placed, it compares projected fulfillments dates with actual fulfillments, highlighting when customers have skipped or rescheduled.
The next release will add the ability to edit, create, and export subscription records manually, allowing the feature to work cleanly alongside any existing subscription app or CSV workflow.
Recipes and ingredients
This is the backbone of the production planning system.
Each product can now have a recipe attached to it, and each recipe is made up of steps. The key field on each step is hours before fulfilment — which allows the app to work backwards from a collection or delivery date and tell you exactly what needs to happen, and when.
Steps also carry a list of ingredients and quantities, so the system understands not just the timing, but the materials involved.
This structure supports production processes that span multiple days without awkward workarounds — it’s designed to handle it directly.
Automatically generating a daily production schedule
This is where it all comes together.
The production schedule view takes your upcoming fulfilments, applies the relevant recipes, and generates a daily plan: what steps to carry out, at what time, and with exactly what quantities of each ingredient.
How to plan sourdough production (example)
A sourdough example makes this concrete. Say your recipe has three steps:
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T−48h — Feed the levain
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T−24h — Mix the dough and begin bulk fermentation
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T−0 — Shape and bake
For a Friday morning collection, the app tells you to:
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Feed your starter on Wednesday
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Mix on Thursday
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Bake on Friday
— with the exact quantity of ingredients needed for each day, depending on how many loaves are due.
This is simple enough if you are just baking 1 or 2 loaves per week, but when you start to bake multiple products for different customers on different days, and each product has multiple steps over many days, things can get overwhelming quickly!
Who this is for
I built this for Jack’s Bread, but the features are generic enough to be useful for any Shopify merchant doing made-to-order production:
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Bakeries
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Meal kit businesses
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Fermenters
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Wood workers
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Small batch food producers
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Craft manufacturers
Anywhere the gap between “order received” and “product ready” involves real production steps, real timing, and real materials.
If you’re running subscriptions on top of that — whether through Recharge, Bold, Applstle, Seal, or anything else that schedules fulfilments through Shopify orders — the subscription detection and scheduling features are particularly relevant.
Get involved
The Fulfillment Planner isn’t yet listed on the Shopify App Store. Before a wider release, I’d like to work with a small number of merchants to refine the feature set for real-world use cases beyond my own.
If this sounds like something that would genuinely help your operation, I’d love to hear from you.
This would be a collaborative arrangement — early access to the app in exchange for feedback that shapes where it goes next.
Get in touch via the contact page, or drop me an email directly. Happy to have a conversation about what you’re making and whether this might be a good fit.
Jack’s Bread is a micro bakery in Berkshire. The Bake Tech blog covers the software side of running it — because apparently that became a thing.
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