Retail Bakery Design and Operational Performance in Kenya

Abstract

Bakeries play a significant role in employment and wealth creation but most important it makes bread and other delicacies that we take in daily, Although we take bread daily we rarely think about its production system and difficulties encountered in its production.The shelf life of baked products highly affected by temperature, pH, water activity, and bacterial contaminations. Product safety has to be considered in the design. Food products face risks like lack of traceability, transport delays/breakdowns and temperature abuse, cross-contamination in transport and storage.This has necessitated a revisit of the bakery design. This research was carried out to find the effect of retail bakery design on the operational performance of supermarket retail bakeries in Nairobi County. The core objectives being to identify process type used, and the kind of influence they had on the operational performance. The researcher used a cross-sectional descriptive research design to conduct this research. The population of the study was all the supermarket bakeries in Nairobi County. The researcher used a census of all the 17 supermarkets in Nairobi County. Questionnaires were used as the tools for data collection. Descriptive statistics was used to analyse the data using such as means, standard deviations and frequency distributions. The findings from the study established that most bakeries had a batch type of processes deigns. The study also established that retail bakery design resulted in an improved operational performance in bakeries. This study recommends retail bakery design as opposed to mass and continuous production since it offers flexibility, quality and speed all which increases customer satisfaction and firm’s competitiveness