The morning count at a Subway franchise is not an approximation. Each product location — retarder, cabinet, freezer bags versus freezer sticks, fridge staging — represents a different point in the proofing and baking pipeline, and the numbers feed directly into the day's bake schedule. Pull the wrong count and you're either baking short and running out at the 1 PM rush, or overbaking and writing off product at close.
This template was built by someone who runs a store, not someone who sells inventory software.
Bread Location Is the Whole Point
White and Wheat track the two primary loaf counts. White Flat and Wheat Flat handle the flatbread variants separately — they have different proofing requirements and different consumption rates, particularly at locations with heavy wrap traffic.
The location split is where this template goes deeper than a simple stock count. Retarder Bread captures what's in cold retardation — not yet proofed, not yet baked. Baked Bread is finished product in the cabinet. Total Bread in Cabinet is the actionable number: what's available to serve right now without further prep.
# of Bags in Freezer and # of Bags in Fridge together describe the staging pipeline. Bags in the freezer represent raw capacity measured in days out. Bags in the fridge are thawing and moving toward retarder-ready status. The ratio between those two numbers tells a trained manager whether the store is set up for the next 24 hours or running lean.
Frozen Cases and Frozen Sticks (and Total Frozen) break down the deep freezer inventory by unit type. Sticks count individually for projection purposes; cases count for reorder calculation.
The Bowl Count That Prevents the 12:15 PM Problem
Front Bowls and Back Bowls track salad bowl inventory by location. Front is the prep line — what's immediately accessible to the sandwich artists during service. Back is the prep kitchen stock.
The 12:15 PM problem is specific: the front bowls run out mid-rush. Restocking from the back during peak service slows the line, and the back count was never verbally communicated to the person on the register. The template's explicit front/back split means the morning count establishes the starting position, and the shift lead knows without asking how much runway exists in the prep area.
Total Bread, Total Flatbread, Total Salad Bowls, and Total Frozen are the summary fields — the four numbers that answer the morning operations question in a single glance. The Date field anchors each count to a specific day, enabling the week-over-week consumption analysis that franchise owners need for ordering decisions. An Other field handles anything that doesn't fit the standard SKU breakdown.