Numbers are Great, but Cookies are Better - Exploring Flour Bakery

Flour: An Overview

As I mentioned above, Flour operates in 8 locations across the Boston area.

You can see that their most popular spots are in Central and Copley Square. The Copley location is the one right by where I work. Given the number of cookies I buy each week, I feel justified in taking at least a little credit for its success.

As with any good bakery/coffeshop/lunch destination, Flour has three main categories of food: “Savory”, “Pastry”, and “Beverages”. These categories are relatively self-explanatory. Savory goods are mostly sandwiches and salads and pastries are - well - pastries. Beverages tend to represent coffee sales, though Flour offers a few other drinks too.

Despite my many cookie purchases, it turns out that savory items make up the majority of Flour’s sales. This is largely due to the price difference between a salad and a croissant. Lunch items tend to cost ~$10, while pastries are closer to $2-3.

(FYI - the above analysis excludes some of Flour’s other categories, such as catering.)

If you strip price from the picture and just look at total items sold, this flips on its head.

While sandwiches and salads drive most of the dollars that come through Flour’s door, Flour still sells more pastries than it does savory goods. As you can see in the above chart, nearly 40% of all items sold are pastries. My hypothesis is that about half of those pastry sales are me, but I’m too scared to try to find out.

Top Sellers

Let’s dig a level deeper. We know pastries are selling like hotcakes (pun intended), but which pastries are they exactly? Are all the purchases chocolate chip cookies, or are there other baked goods that are more popular?

(I’ll be sticking with total sales from here on out - once you start looking within a category like Savory or Pastry, price differences don’t matter as much.)

Muffins lead the way! If I am being honest, this one is a bit surprising to me, though that may reflect more of my personal preference than anything else.

Hear me out: It’s not that I don’t like Flour’s muffins - they are great. But between brownies, oreos, scones, and sticky buns (let alone the many great pastries not even on this list), I’m not sure I would have suspected the muffin to be the top seller.

I have an idea for what might be going on. Let’s take a closer look.

Aha! In the above chart, I split pastry sales by time of day for the top 10 overall pastries. Morning includes all sales until 12pm, while the afternoon group includes sales from 12-5pm.

Clearly, muffins and scones are treats of the morning crowd. Specifically, while muffins constitute over 10% of all pastry sales in the morning, muffins plummet to <5% of afternoon sales. And which pastry takes its place in the afternoon? The chocolate chip cookie.

This explains why the data bucked my intuition. I’m not a huge breakfast eater, so I am rarely there in the morning. That’s why I rarely see muffin sales.

(Interestingly, sticky buns remain relatively constant as a percent of pastry sales across both the morning and the afternoon! Same with banana bread. Both of those pastries bridge the gap between sweet breakfast option and afternoon snack.)

Let’s take a similar pass through the savory items.

The egg sandwich runs away with it! It turns out that the egg sandwich is far and away Flour’s best savory seller. Outside of the egg sandwich, the Greek Salad and Chicken Sandwich are the two winners, though Flour’s BLT and Roast Beef are close behind.

And since I’m a completionist…

Coffees and teas, with a little seltzer thrown in as well.

One quick caveat on this analysis before we move on: Flour’s data can be messy, which means that sometimes the same menu item has multiple names. For example, sometimes banana bread is called “banana bread” and sometimes it is called “bbread”. I’ve done my best to clean this up, but I am not capturing all of the data - specifically, about 14% of sales has been excluded due to the messiness.

How can I just buy one?

When you’re faced with a menu as good as Flour’s, it’s hard to choose what you want. So hard, in fact, that ~60% of orders include more than one item.

This includes if the same item is sold twice. For example, if I go to Flour and buy seven oreos (who am I kidding … when I go to Flour and buy seven oreos), I’m counting that as more than one item.

Setting my many-oreo purchases aside for the moment, it would be interesting to check out which items are typically sold together. For instance, my intuition is that “Muffin and a coffee” would a much more common purchase than “BLT and Oreo”.

In order to look at this more rigorously, we will look at the correlation between each of the items. This is essentially a way of asking “How often are these two items purchased as part of the same order?” If two items are purchased together frequently, the score will be close to 1. If two items are almost certainly never purchased together (e.g. purchasing one item means you’re definitely not going to get the other), the score will be close to -1. Scores close to zero indicate that there is no real relationship: Just because you buy one item doesn’t mean you’re more or less likely to buy the other.

In general, it can be a bit odd to look at correlations between qualitative variables (e.g. looking at the correlation between yes/no questions like “Did this order include a brownie?” and “Did this order include a BLT?”). That said, as a quick and dirty way to directionally look at which item-pairs are relatively more likely to be purchased together, it should do the trick.

Let’s take a look at the top 10 most correlated pairs:

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## Joining, by = "Order.Id"

It looks like the most common “paired purchases” actually occur in the cookie aisle. Even more than a soup/sandwich combination or a pairing of coffee and a breakfast food, customers tend to purchase cookies in groups.

Admittedly, none of these correlations are very high: Even though the Ginger Molasses / Chocolate Chip comes in first place, plenty of people still purchase Chocolate Chip cookies on their own. At the very least, however, I continue to feel validated in thinking I’m not the only one out there taking cookie breaks.

FYI, for those of you that were wondering - the “muffin and a coffee” combination came in at .069, while the ever popular BLT-Oreo buy was a hot .002.

How to beat the crowds

From personal experience, I can attest that Flour gets pretty busy, especially right around lunchtime. You can quantify this in the data.

Two quick chart notes: The x-axis of the above chart reads in military time, and each dot reflects sales from the start to the end of that hour. For example, the dot at ‘8’ reflects all purchases from 8-9am, while the dot at ‘13’ reflects all purchases from 1-2pm.

Staring at the above, we can build a picture of the average Flour day. Flour starts to get busy with the morning breakfast crowd: From ~6-9am, sales skyrocket as people pick up all of their muffins. We see a slight dip in the late morning until lunchtime, with the clear peak in sales occuring from 12-1pm. Things taper off post-lunch. There’s some afternoon snacking and a light dinner crowd, but Flour is mostly done for the day around 7pm.

This tends to be consistent across the different locations, though with an interesting twist for Cambridgeport and Drydock.

Every location follows the same trend, though Cambridgeport and Dry Dock have a much higher spike around noon. It would take a lot more digging to know for sure what is happening here, but one possible explanation is that these locations are less situated at an ‘early commuter breakfast spot’ as the others.

What’s the main takeaway here? If you are looking to go to Flour when it’s a bit less packed, you’ll tend to have more luck after 9am (for coffee or breakfast) or 1pm onwards (for a late lunch).

Of course, if you really wanted to beat the crowds, you could also use Flour’s app and order in advance! That’s what I tend to do: You can place an order and then drop by in 15-20min to pick it up. About 5% of Flour’s sales overall move through the app, with another 5-10% coming from other online channels.

An ode to the hummus sandwich