Family-Owned Bakery Grows to International Manufacturer with NetSuite

In 1984, five brothers fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon, survived an ocean voyage fraught with pirates, spent more than a year in a Malaysian refugee camp before arriving in America and pooled their savings to buy a small donut shop in San Francisco. Sugar Bowl Bakery ultimately grew to manufacture a line of desserts sold at supermarkets, club stores and big box stores across the US.

“We knew we wanted to keep scaling and didn’t want the complexity of servers to be a bottleneck. We didn’t want the ERP system to hold us back.”

– Michael Ly, General Manager and Vice President, Sugar Bowl Bakery –

EXPANDING BEYOND HUMBLE BEGINNINGS

Sugar Bowl Bakery expanded to a food service business for hotels and convention centers and supplied local shops until a deal with Costco to sell their Palmiers cookie helped turn it into a large bakery manufacturer. Making high-end desserts using real butter at low cost, it now bakes up to 2 million items a day from two state-of-the-art manufacturing plants.

TRANSITION TO MANUFACTURING AT SCALE

As the company transitioned from food service to manufacturing, it not only had to build new facilities but overhaul its internal processes. And as it grew, leadership understood an aging Microsoft NAV system, which was seldom updated due to intense customization, couldn’t keep up.

SWEETENING OPERATIONS WITH NETSUITE

Sugar Bowl Bakery implemented NetSuite in 2013, replacing Microsoft, to manage financials. In January of 2018, it added the Advanced Manufacturing module to streamline manufacturing, enabling the business to transition to standard cost-based with variance accounting to better see the impact of pricing and recipe changes.

EASTERN MIGRATION ON HORIZON

With NetSuite as its system of record, delivering insights and shop floor discipline, Sugar Bowl is poised to continue to expand as it evaluates new manufacturing facilities to serve its East Coast customers and improve efficiency.