The Giving Pumpkin: Building a Custom Order System for a Home Bakery
I built a bakery order management system for my wife’s seasonal home bakery. 36 orders, 100% processed through the system in its first season.
The Problem
The Giving Pumpkin is a home bakery in Lampasas, Texas specializing in organic, gluten-free pumpkin bread. The logistics challenge: orders come in during a sales window, then get fulfilled through hand-delivered batches to pickup locations across central Texas.
No off-the-shelf e-commerce platform handles batch-based delivery routing well. Shopify, Square, WooCommerce — they’re all built for ship-to-door or single-location pickup. None of them handle “group orders by pickup location, calculate bake totals per batch, then route deliveries across multiple stops.”
We tried spreadsheets. It worked for 10 orders. It broke at 20.
The Build
Customer side: Product catalog, shopping cart, pickup location selection, and checkout. Clean, mobile-first. A non-technical customer should be able to order pumpkin bread without friction.
Admin side: This is where the real complexity lives.
- Order management with status tracking (received → baking → ready → delivered)
- Batch creation with auto-calculated bake totals — how many loaves, total weight, per location
- Multi-location delivery routing — group orders by pickup point, optimize the route
- Customer management and communication
- Coupon administration for promotions
The batch system is the core feature. When my wife is ready to bake, she creates a batch. The system pulls in all pending orders, groups them by pickup location, calculates exactly how many loaves to bake and the total weight. She knows exactly what to make and where it goes.
Tech Stack
- SvelteKit — fast, lightweight, great DX
- Supabase — PostgreSQL database + auth + real-time
- Tailwind CSS — consistent styling
- Vercel — deployment with auto-deploys on push
Designed so a non-technical bakery owner could run it day-to-day without developer support.
Results
First season: 36 orders, 100% processed through the app. Zero manual tracking. Zero lost orders. My wife ran the entire operation from her phone.
10% of sales go to Carry Them Ministries in Nigeria.
The Lesson
The best software solves a specific logistics problem for a specific business, not a generic one for everyone. Off-the-shelf tools are great until your workflow doesn’t fit the template. When that happens, a custom build that matches your exact process will always outperform a general-purpose tool you’re fighting against.