AI Tools for Bakeries: Your Complete 2026 Implementation Guide

It's 3am. You've got croissants in the oven, a custom cake consultation at 10, and 47 Instagram DMs you haven't answered. Last Tuesday you threw out $180 worth of unsold pastries because you overbaked. The Tuesday before that, you sold out of sourdough by noon and had to watch customers walk out disappointed.

The average bakery runs on a 4-9% net margin. Flour is up 12%, eggs spiked past $8/dozen in early 2025 before settling back down (check current prices — they fluctuate fast), and your team keeps turning over because 4am starts are brutal. Meanwhile, Instagram wants daily content and your regulars expect you to answer DMs at midnight.

Most of this is fixable. Not with expensive enterprise software or a dedicated IT person — with free and low-cost AI tools you can set up between now and next Monday. This guide tells you exactly which ones, in what order, and what kind of results to expect.

Understanding the Bakery Business in 2026

Bakeries aren't like other small businesses, and most "AI for business" guides don't account for that. Your inventory is perishable. Your production happens before sunrise. Your best products require the most manual coordination. So here's the reality before we talk tools.

Every croissant costs money the second it comes out of the oven. If it doesn't sell by close, that's a loss — not something you can defer. Industry data puts daily waste anywhere from 2% for tight-run small bakeries to 20% or more for larger operations with poor forecasting. For a mid-size bakery, that can mean $50 to $200 per day, or $18,000 to $73,000 per year, walking out the door in trash bags.

Custom cakes are your highest-margin category (60-75% gross margins vs. 50-60% for everyday bread), but they're also operationally brutal. Each one needs a consultation, a written order, ingredient tracking, production scheduling, deposit collection, and pickup coordination. One wrong flavor or missed allergen costs $50-$300 in materials for the remake — plus a customer you'll never see again.

Then there's social media. The majority of new customers now discover bakeries through Instagram and TikTok, but owners report spending 5-10 hours per week on content creation. When you're working 4am-to-2pm shifts, those hours come directly out of sleep.

The gap between a 5% margin bakery and a 12% margin bakery isn't a secret recipe. It's better production planning, accurate costing, and consistent marketing — all of which you can now automate.

Here's what a typical year looks like for a $350,000 bakery before any of these tools:

• Labor: $87,500-$101,500 (25-29%)
• Ingredients (COGS): $87,500-$105,000 (25-30%)
• Rent: $28,000-$42,000 (8-12%)
• Food waste: $18,000-$73,000 (5-21% of production)
• Net profit: $14,000-$31,500 (4-9%)

That food waste line is where AI pays for itself on day one.

Phase 1: Quick Wins — This Week, $0-$35/Month

These tools solve your three most expensive daily problems: overproduction waste, underpriced custom orders, and the social media time drain. They require nothing more than a smartphone and 3-5 hours of total setup time.

1. AI-Powered Daily Production Planning with ChatGPT

You already do production planning in your head every night. The problem is you're doing it at 11pm, exhausted, pulling numbers from memory. Some mornings you overbake by 20%. Others you sell out of your best items by noon.

Move that process into ChatGPT. Every evening, spend 5 minutes feeding it last week's sales data, upcoming custom orders, the weather forecast, and any local events. It returns a recommended production schedule with exact quantities per item. Not a guess — a structured analysis of the same data points you were already weighing, just without the 11pm brain fog.

Setup:

1. Sign up at chatgpt.com (free) or claude.ai (free)
2. Export last week's sales by item from your POS — even a screenshot of your daily totals works
3. Every evening before bed, run the production planning prompt below
4. For the first two weeks, adjust the AI's recommendations by ±15% based on your gut
5. Track actual vs. planned production daily in a simple spreadsheet
6. After two weeks, share your tracking data with the AI to let it calibrate

Within 3-4 weeks, bakeries with high waste rates can often cut overproduction significantly — some owners report halving their daily waste. That's $800-$3,000 per month recovered — from a free tool. You'll also save 45-60 minutes daily that you were spending on mental math.

I'm a bakery owner. Here are last week's sales by item and day:
[Paste your sales data — even a rough breakdown works]
Upcoming custom orders this week:
[List each custom order with date needed]
Weather forecast for tomorrow: [sunny/rainy/cold/hot]
Local events or holidays this week: [list any]
Day of week: [Monday/Tuesday/etc.]
Give me a recommended production schedule for tomorrow with exact quantities
per item. Flag any ingredient orders I need to place tonight, and note any
items where you'd expect higher or lower demand than usual. Explain your
reasoning briefly for each quantity recommendation.

2. AI Custom Order Pricing — Stop Undercharging for Cakes

How long does it take you to price a 3-tier wedding cake? If the answer is "20-30 minutes and I'm still not sure I got it right," you're in the majority. Most bakery owners underprice custom work because the real cost calculation — ingredients, labor at $30-50/hour (yes, your time counts), packaging, overhead — is tedious enough that people round down and move on.

Open ChatGPT during your next consultation. Feed it your ingredient costs, your hourly rate, and your target margin. Two minutes later you have a professional price breakdown you can share with the customer on the spot.

Setup:

1. Create a "master cost sheet" on your phone listing current per-unit costs for: flour (per lb), butter (per lb), eggs (per unit), fondant (per lb), and your 10 most-used specialty ingredients
2. Set your hourly labor rate — minimum $30-50/hour for your time (you're a skilled professional)
3. During each custom order consultation, open ChatGPT and run the pricing prompt below
4. For large orders (weddings, corporate events), add: "Suggest an appropriate deposit amount and payment schedule"
5. After 10 quotes, check: are customers accepting more? Are you hitting your target margin on completed orders?

Expect to save 2-4 hours per week on pricing alone, plus $500-$2,000/month in margin you were leaving on the table. Fair warning: the first time you run this on your existing menu, you'll probably find 2-3 items you've been selling at or below cost.

I'm pricing a custom [describe the order: e.g., 3-tier wedding cake, 10-inch
birthday cake with fondant decorations, 2 dozen cupcakes with custom toppers].
Here are my ingredients and estimated quantities:
[List: e.g., flour 2 lbs @ $0.80/lb, butter 1.5 lbs @ $6/lb, eggs 12 @ $0.50/ea,
fondant 2 lbs @ $8/lb, etc.]
Estimated labor time: [X hours] at $[Y]/hour
My overhead rate is approximately 15% of ingredient costs
I want a 65% gross margin on this order
Please calculate:

Total ingredient cost
Total labor cost
Total overhead
Recommended retail price to hit 65% gross margin
A clean price breakdown I can share with the customer
Suggested deposit amount (I typically ask for 50%)

3. Batch Your Social Media in 1 Hour Per Week with Canva + ChatGPT

Monday mornings are slow. Use that hour to build an entire week of social media content instead of scrambling to post something between the oven timer and the register. Canva handles the visuals, ChatGPT writes your first-draft captions, and you add the personal details that make it actually sound like you.

Setup:

1. Sign up at canva.com (free) and download the mobile app
2. Search "bakery" in templates — save 10-15 Instagram post designs you like as starting points
3. Take 10-15 product photos this week: natural light near a window, clean background, slightly angled. These are your content raw material for the next 3 months.
4. Use ChatGPT to generate a 2-week content calendar (see prompt below)
5. Block 1 hour every Monday to build the week's posts in Canva using your photos + AI captions
6. Schedule using Instagram's free built-in scheduler or Canva's free scheduler (up to 5 posts)

One rule: do not use AI-generated food images. Customers want to see YOUR croissants, not a stock AI pastry. Your real baked goods are the entire point.

Create a 2-week Instagram content calendar for my bakery. We specialize in
[your specialty: e.g., artisan sourdough and French pastries / custom celebration
cakes / gluten-free baked goods].
Mix the following content types:

3 product showcase posts (specific items with compelling descriptions)
2 behind-the-scenes posts (early morning baking, process shots)
1 customer story or testimonial post
2 seasonal or promotional posts
2 educational posts (baking tips, ingredient spotlights, process explainers)
4 engagement posts (polls, questions, "this or that")
For each post include:

Post type
Caption (warm, conversational, under 150 words)
8-10 relevant hashtags
Best time to post (Tuesday/Thursday evenings and Saturday mornings perform best for local food businesses)

4. Stop 4am No-Shows with Homebase (Free for Up to 10 Employees)

A baker no-show at 4am isn't an inconvenience — it can mean you don't open. And right now you're probably spending 3-5 hours a week building schedules by hand, then hoping everyone remembers to show up.

Homebase fixes both problems. The free plan covers up to 10 employees at one location with automatic shift reminders via text. The reminder goes out the night before and again 2 hours before the shift. It's a simple change, but no-show rates drop significantly when people have a nudge on their phone instead of relying on memory.

Setup:

1. Sign up at joinhomebase.com (select "Restaurant/Food Service")
2. Add your location and create shift templates: "Baker AM" (3am-11am), "Counter Open" (6am-2pm), "Counter PM" (10am-6pm)
3. Invite employees via text — they install the Homebase app
4. Enable automatic shift reminders — this is the single most important step for bakeries
5. Turn on the time clock so employees clock in/out from their phones — no more manual timesheets
6. Build next week's schedule in 15-20 minutes vs. 1+ hours previously

You'll save 2-3 hours per week on scheduling and $200-$500/month from fewer no-shows and timesheet errors. Total cost: zero.

5. Handle Google Reviews in a Weekly 20-Minute Batch

A one-star drop in your Google rating can mean a 5-9% revenue decrease, according to a widely cited Harvard Business School study. You know you should respond to reviews, but writing thoughtful responses takes 15-30 minutes each, and who has that kind of time?

Set aside 20 minutes every Sunday evening. Paste each review into ChatGPT, get a draft response in 30 seconds, tweak it so it sounds like you, and post. Respond to every review — positive and negative. Google treats consistent engagement as a signal that you're an active business and rewards it in local search rankings.

Write a professional, warm response to this Google review of my bakery
[Bakery Name]. Keep it under 100 words, acknowledge their specific feedback
by name if mentioned, and invite them to return. Our bakery is known for
[your specialty].
[Paste the full review text here]
If this is a negative review, add: Be empathetic, avoid being defensive,
acknowledge the specific issue, and offer to make it right. Include an
invitation to contact us directly at [phone/email].

Phase 1 total investment: $0-$35/month (ChatGPT free tier handles everything; ChatGPT Plus at $20/month is useful for heavy users)

Phase 1 total time to set up: 3-5 hours spread across two evenings

Phase 1 expected monthly impact:

• Waste reduction: $800-$3,000
• Recovered margin on custom orders: $500-$2,000
• Social media time saved: 4-7 hours/week
• Schedule management saved: 2-3 hours/week

Phase 2: Profitability Optimization — Weeks 3-8, $155-$490/Month

Phase 1 showed you the quick wins. Now it's time to fix the data problems underneath: you still don't know your exact cost per product, social media still takes more time than it should, and custom orders get messy during busy weeks.

1. Find Out Which Products Are Actually Making Money — Craftybase

That croissant you're famous for? With butter up 15-20% this year, it might be breaking even once you factor in labor and packaging. You won't know until you run the real numbers — and Craftybase was built for exactly this.

It tracks true cost per recipe, calculates COGS automatically as you produce, and suggests retail prices based on actual ingredient costs. Not guesswork. Not gut feel.

Setup:

1. Start the Craftybase free trial at craftybase.com
2. Block 2-3 hours on your slowest day to enter your top 10-15 recipes with ingredient quantities
3. Enter current ingredient costs from your most recent supplier invoices — outdated prices give you wrong numbers, so use the latest ones
4. Set target margins: 55-65% for bread, 60-70% for pastries, 65-75% for custom cakes
5. Run the "Smart Pricing" report and look at every item below your target margin
6. Connect to Square or Shopify for automatic sales syncing
7. Set a monthly calendar reminder to update ingredient costs

One thing to expect: you'll find items that are underpriced, and you'll hesitate to raise them. Do it anyway. A 5-10% increase on items you're selling below cost almost never loses customers. Your regulars come for the quality and the experience, not because you're the cheapest option in town.

2. Schedule All Your Social Media in One Sitting — Vista Social

By now you're creating content faster, but you're still posting manually to each platform. Vista Social puts everything — Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Google Business — in one dashboard and posts at optimal times automatically.

Setup:

1. Sign up at vistasocial.com and connect Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Google Business Profile
2. Import the content calendar you've been creating with ChatGPT from Phase 1
3. Use the AI Assistant to generate caption variations — pick the best one and add your personal touch
4. Enable "Smart Scheduling" so it posts when your specific audience is most active
5. Spend one hour every Monday scheduling the entire week across all platforms
6. Check the analytics dashboard monthly and double down on what's working

This saves another 2-4 hours per week on top of your Phase 1 gains, and the consistency alone tends to drive $500-$1,500/month in additional foot traffic.

3. Capture Custom Orders 24/7 — Jotform AI Agents

Picture this: it's 9pm on a Thursday and someone is browsing your website trying to order a birthday cake for Saturday. Your shop is closed. They can't call, they DM you on Instagram (where it gets buried), and by morning they've ordered from someone else.

A Jotform AI Agent sits on your website and walks customers through the entire order — size, flavor, filling, decorations, allergens, event date, pickup preference — any time of day. You get a complete, structured order in your inbox instead of a garbled phone message or a DM that says "can u do a cake for sat?"

Setup:

1. Go to jotform.com/agent-templates/order-ai-agents/bakery-order-ai-agents and pick the closest template
2. Customize with your specific options: sizes, flavors, fillings, decoration tiers, and allergen questions
3. Add pricing rules from your Phase 1 ChatGPT calculations or Craftybase data
4. Embed the agent on your website — Jotform provides a simple code snippet
5. Add the direct link to your Instagram bio and Facebook page
6. Set up email notifications for every new submission — respond within 24 hours

Allergen safety note: Write and verify every allergen-related answer yourself. The AI delivers your information; it does not create it. This is a food safety and liability issue.

4. Get Real Financial Visibility — QuickBooks Online with Intuit Assist AI

Do you know if you made money this month? Not "probably" — actually know? Most bakery owners can't answer that until the bookkeeper catches up 3-4 weeks later. QuickBooks' Intuit Assist AI closes that gap by auto-categorizing transactions, capturing receipts from phone photos, predicting cash flow, and flagging unusual expenses in real time.

Setup:

1. Connect your business bank accounts and credit cards for automatic transaction importing
2. Spend 30 minutes categorizing your first 50 transactions — this trains the AI on your spending patterns
3. Download the mobile app and start photographing every supplier invoice immediately
4. Set a weekly 15-minute "financial check-in" every Monday: review categorized transactions, approve or correct, check cash flow forecast
5. Connect your POS for automatic daily sales import

Phase 2 total investment: $155-$490/month (Craftybase $79 + Vista Social free-$79 + Jotform free + QuickBooks $38-115)

Phase 2 expected monthly impact:

• Eliminated underpriced products: $1,000-$3,000/month
• Captured after-hours custom orders: $400-$1,200/month
• Social media consistency driving foot traffic: $500-$1,500/month
• Bookkeeping time saved: 2-4 hours/week

Phase 3: Competitive Advantage — Months 3-6, $450-$800+/Month

At this point you have clean cost data, consistent social media, and a working production system. These tools take it further: automated inventory ordering, professional custom order management for high-volume weeks, and a website chatbot that captures leads while you sleep.

Important: Phase 3 tools make the most sense for bakeries doing $400,000+ in annual revenue. Smaller operations should stay on Phase 1-2 indefinitely — those tools already generate strong ROI at any scale.

1. Automate Inventory and Ingredient Ordering — MarketMan

Craftybase tells you what things cost. MarketMan makes sure you never run out of them — and alerts you when a supplier jacks up prices before you've baked a week's worth of product at the old margins. Right now you're probably spending 5-8 hours per week on inventory counts and manual ordering. Most of that goes away.

Expect to save 4-6 hours per week on inventory and ordering, plus $1,500-$4,000/month from lower food costs, fewer stockouts, and catching vendor price increases early.

Start with your top 20 ingredients and 10 best-selling recipes — don't try to enter everything on day one. The tool works immediately with partial data. Connect your POS on setup day, though. Without real-time sales data, the cost variance analysis doesn't function. (If you also run a full-service kitchen, our restaurant AI guide covers MarketMan and similar tools in more depth.)

2. Professionalize Your Custom Order Operation — BakeSmart

If you're doing 10+ custom orders per week, Jotform from Phase 2 captures orders well but doesn't connect them to your production calendar, auto-calculate Cake Matrix pricing, track deposits, or generate production tickets for your bakers. BakeSmart does all of this.

Budget 6-8 hours spread over the onboarding period. The most important step is fully configuring the Cake Matrix with all your pricing options — if it's incomplete, customers call instead of ordering online, which defeats the purpose. Go all-in from day one. Running paper and digital in parallel just doubles your workload.

3. Answer Customer Questions and Capture Leads 24/7 — Tidio

Your phone rings most between 6-10am — exactly when every staff member is either baking, serving customers, or both. Meanwhile, people visit your website at 9pm looking for gluten-free options, Saturday hours, or last-minute birthday cakes, and find no way to get answers until tomorrow.

Saves 2-3 hours per week on repetitive phone and email inquiries, and captures $500-$2,000/month in after-hours leads that would otherwise go to a competitor who answers faster.

4. Generate Reviews on Autopilot — Reviewly.ai

Look at the bakery across town with 200 Google reviews at 4.8 stars. They're not better than you — they're just asking for reviews systematically. In Phase 1, you started responding to reviews with ChatGPT. Reviewly.ai handles the other side: sending automated review request texts after each purchase so your happy regulars actually leave the review they always meant to write.

Phase 3 total investment: $450-$800+/month (MarketMan $249 + BakeSmart from $99 + Tidio ~$39-70 + Reviewly.ai $99)

Phase 3 expected monthly impact:

• Food cost reduction: $1,500-$4,000/month
• Custom order efficiency: $1,000-$3,000/month
• After-hours lead capture: $500-$2,000/month
• Review-driven new customer traffic: $300-$1,000/month

What to Avoid: The Overhyped Bakery Tech Traps

Not every AI tool deserves your budget. Here's what we recommend skipping — at least for now.

Don't buy enterprise demand forecasting (Inpulse AI, Nory AI) before you have clean sales data. These platforms — which cost hundreds of dollars per month — need 3-6 months of itemized POS data to train their models. If your POS doesn't track sales by individual product (some just record total revenue), the AI has nothing to learn from. Use Phase 1's ChatGPT production planner while your POS collects clean data. Revisit after six months.

Don't invest in Wasteless dynamic pricing for your display case. Wasteless is an enterprise tool built for grocery chains with electronic shelf labels. For a bakery, a simple "final 2 hours = 30% off" chalkboard sign works just as well. Automate the discount logic with a ChatGPT prompt if you want — it costs nothing.

Don't use AI-generated food images on social media. AI image generators still cannot produce food photos that look as good as a real iPhone shot of your actual croissant in morning light. Your customers want to see YOUR products, baked by YOUR hands. Authenticity is your competitive advantage over every chain bakery in a 50-mile radius — don't trade it for a generated image.

Don't let AI write allergen information without your review. When deploying AI chatbots on your website, you write and verify every allergen answer. The AI delivers your verified information — it doesn't create it. Your health department inspector and any customer with a serious food allergy hold you responsible, not the software vendor.

Don't sign annual contracts before 2 months of use. Most tools in this plan offer monthly billing and free trials. Use the trial. Pay monthly for 60 days. Only switch to annual billing (15-25% discount) after you've confirmed the tool works for your specific operation. Sales demos are designed to create urgency — the 15-25% annual discount will still be there in two months.

Your Getting-Started Checklist

FAQ: AI Tools for Bakeries

How much time will this realistically take to set up?

Phase 1: 3-5 hours across two evenings. Phase 2's biggest chunk is entering recipes into Craftybase (another 3-4 hours). After that, you're looking at 5 minutes per evening for production planning, 1 hour per week for social media, and 20 minutes for reviews. Most owners report saving 12-18 hours per week within 30 days.

Will AI-generated social media content feel fake to my customers?

Only if you post the first draft without touching it. AI gives you a starting point — the content calendar, caption structure, hashtag research. You add the part only you know: "We pulled these out at 5:30am and they were gone by 8" hits differently than "Fresh croissants available daily." The AI does the scaffolding. You add the soul.

I use paper order forms for custom cakes — why change what works?

Count your remakes. If illegible handwriting, lost forms, or miscommunication between front staff and bakers is costing you even 2-3 mistakes per month at $50-$300 each, a digital system pays for itself immediately. Paper works fine on a good day. The question is how much the bad days cost you.

My margins are already razor thin — can I actually afford these tools?

Phase 1 is free. Before starting Phase 2, add up what you're losing monthly to food waste, underpriced custom orders, and scheduling chaos. For most bakeries, it's $1,500-$5,000. Craftybase at $79/month against $1,000+ in recovered margin is a 12x return.

What about my regulars — will they notice the change?

Your social media will be more consistent. Your website might have a chat widget. That's it. Everything else — production planning, cost tracking, scheduling — runs behind the scenes. Your sourdough still tastes like your sourdough.

Is it safe to use AI for allergen information?

No — not without you writing every answer yourself. The AI delivers your verified information; it never creates allergen content on its own. This applies to chatbots, order forms, everything customer-facing. You're the ServSafe-certified professional. The AI is just the delivery mechanism.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much will this cost to set up — won't I need a specialist to install everything?

Phase 1 (ChatGPT, Homebase, Canva, review responses) is free or $30-40/month, and you set it up yourself in an afternoon. Phase 2 adds Craftybase ($79/month) and Vista Social ($79/month) — another few hours of work, zero specialist needed. You're signing up for websites and connecting apps via OAuth — nothing more technical than linking your Instagram to Facebook. The "complicated" part is deciding which recipes to enter into Craftybase, not the software itself.

My waste is from late-day markdowns, not overproduction. Won't this plan miss my problem?

Actually no. Craftybase shows you the cost and margin of every product you're discounting. You'll probably discover that the item you're marking down 40% in the final hour was already below cost or right at your ingredient threshold. The real fix: charge full price for that item during peak hours, drop the recipe from tomorrow's batch, or raise the baseline price. The data from Craftybase tells you which approach makes sense for each product.

Will customers complain if I raise prices after running Craftybase?

Probably not, if you're strategic. You'll raise prices on items you've been underpricing (often 5-10%). Regulars come back for quality and consistency, not because you're the cheapest option. A 5-10% increase on a $4 croissant (to $4.20-$4.40) is invisible. What does upset customers: inconsistency. Running out of sourdough by noon on Tuesday and having it available until close on Wednesday. Craftybase fixes the consistency problem — that's what customers actually care about.

I take orders by phone and Instagram DM. Jotform looks good, but will customers actually use it?

Yes — but only if the link is easy to find. Add it to your Instagram bio (top of profile) and your website header. For phone inquiries, say: "I can take your order over the phone, or if you'd rather, I have a form on the website that captures everything and gives you an instant price." Many customers will choose the form because it removes the "did I remember everything right?" anxiety. Start by offering both options, then track usage. Most shops find 40-60% of custom orders flow through the form within 60 days.

What if I just want production planning and waste reduction — do I need to do all three phases?

No. Phase 1 alone (ChatGPT production planning + Homebase scheduling) solves two of the biggest cost problems. If you're recovering $1,500-$2,500/month in waste reduction and scheduled no-shows, you're done. Phase 2 and 3 are expansions, not requirements. Many single-baker operations run profitably on Phase 1 indefinitely.

Won't an AI chatbot on my website feel like I'm abandoning customers?

The opposite concern is more real: a chatbot that works well is invisible. Customers don't think "I'm talking to a robot" if the responses are helpful and match your tone. Tidio lets you review and tune every response template before it goes live. After the first week of monitoring, you'll probably find the chatbot is answering the same five questions (hours, allergens, custom order process, delivery, pricing) that you've been answering manually anyway. The customers who want to talk to a human can still call — the chatbot just handles the people who prefer self-service.

The Bottom Line

Bakeries lose $1,000-$4,000 per month to overproduction waste, underpriced custom orders, social media chaos, and scheduling problems. Phase 1 costs nothing and can recover $2,000-$5,000/month within 30 days depending on your current waste levels and custom order volume. Phase 2 costs $155-$490/month and adds another $2,000-$5,000/month.

The bigger change is harder to quantify: you stop running the business from memory and start running it from data. The 3am production plan happens at 10pm with a cup of tea and a ChatGPT prompt instead of in your head on the drive to the shop.

Start with the checklist above. Tonight. The production planning prompt takes 15 minutes and you'll see results tomorrow morning.

If you also run a catering operation out of your bakery, our catering company guide covers event-specific workflows. And if you're thinking about adding a coffee program, the coffee shop guide has relevant overlap on inventory and customer flow.

Last updated: March 2026. Tool pricing and features change frequently — verify current pricing at each tool's website before purchasing.