Selling out by 11am is the model. Overselling by 11am is the problem. Zayos counts every croissant and takes a cut of none of them.

The custom cake is a bakery's biggest ticket and its worst workflow: a DM thread, a phone call, a hand written note taped to the walk-in. Zayos turns it into a structured preorder. Size, flavor, filling, frosting, inscription and photo reference upload are real menu options, not a notes box. A minimum lead time blocks the diner from ordering inside your window, and payment is captured up front, so the deposit conversation disappears. The decorator gets a clean spec sheet. The no-show cake stops costing you a Saturday.

A good bakery sells out. That is the model, not a failure. The problem is a platform that keeps selling croissants an hour after the case emptied. Zayos carries a production count per item: when the 40th almond croissant sells, the item flips to sold out on every channel at once, and tomorrow's count resets on your schedule. Scarcity becomes a reason to preorder instead of a refund queue.

Thanksgiving pies. Christmas cookie boxes and buches. Valentine's. Mother's Day. Eid sweets. King cakes. A bakery year is a series of surges, and every surge is capacity math. Zayos runs a pre-holiday order window with a defined ordering period, a per day production cap so you never sell pie number 201 when the ovens max out at 200, a hard cutoff, and scheduled pickup slots that spread the day-of line. The kitchen bakes to a known order book instead of a guess.

Cookies and loaves travel. A mille-feuille does not. In Zayos every item is scoped to pickup, local delivery, or both, with its own lead time and pickup windows, so nothing fragile ends up in a courier bag it will not survive. The local case stays a pickup and delivery business, which is where the margin actually is.

Pick six macarons. A mixed dozen cookies. An assorted viennoiserie box. The box is a bakery's natural upsell unit, and generic platforms turn it into twelve separate line items or a notes box guess. Zayos models boxes as pick-N builders with per slot choices and priced upgrades, so the diner assembles the box in taps and the counter packs exactly what the ticket says.

Wedding cakes, dessert tables, croquembouche towers, corporate pastry spreads. The biggest orders of the year deserve better than an email chain. The catering flow handles per guest and per tier sizing, long lead time windows so the decorator's calendar stays honest, and scheduled pickup or delivery. Catering orders carry a 10% service fee that the customer pays at checkout. The bakery still keeps 100% of the food revenue.

The 7:30am line moves at the speed of the register. Order ahead pickup slots let regulars skip it, and every pastry order gets one tap drink add-ons at checkout, because the latte next to the croissant is the highest margin item in the building. Reorder from history makes the daily regular one tap on your own channel, where you keep all of it.

Nuts, gluten, dairy, eggs. A bakery menu is an allergen minefield, and diners with hard constraints filter before they buy. Zayos carries allergen and dietary flags (gluten free, nut free, vegan, halal) at the item and the option level, so the gluten free almond flour torte is findable and the nut allergic parent orders the birthday cake without a phone call.

Otter is the order aggregator that pipes marketplace tickets into a single screen. DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub orders land on the same tablet as your direct Zayos orders. One menu is the source of truth everywhere, so when the sea salt chocolate chip hits zero it is 86ed (marked sold out) on all four channels at once, instead of in four apps while the counter fields refunds.

The Zayos storefront ships schema markup, the structured data search engines read, carrying the phrases diners really type: bakery near me, custom cakes near me, birthday cake order, patisserie, croissants near me. Bakery demand is local, visual and occasion driven. A structured storefront can win searches that a marketplace listing never sees.