Bulk, seconds and ends

The bars that are fine to use and cannot be sold as first quality, which is a real revenue line and a real labeling question.

Every loaf produces them

The two end slices, which are light and frequently mis-shapen.

Bars with a cosmetic flaw: a soda ash bloom, a color bleed, an air pocket, a rough cut.

And bars that came in under the declared weight.

A maker discarding all of these is discarding several percent of production.

What is a second and what is scrap

A second is cosmetically imperfect and chemically identical: safe, effective, and honestly sellable.

Scrap is a bar you would not use yourself: lye-heavy, separated, contaminated, or from a batch you cannot account for.

That second category is not a discount line. It is waste, and selling it cheap is the mistake this page exists to prevent.

The dividing line is the batch record: a flaw you can explain is a second, and a batch you cannot explain is scrap.

Selling seconds honestly

Label them as seconds, plainly, and say why they are discounted.

Customers respond well to it, and a bin of clearly marked seconds at a market sells out.

They still need the same label information as a first-quality bar: identity, net quantity, business name.

And the declared weight has to be right for the bar in the bin, which usually means declaring each rather than printing one weight, or grouping by weight.

Ends and shreds

Ends can be sold as a bag of odds, used as testers, given with orders, or rebatched.

Shreds from planing and bevelling can be pressed into a rustic bar or added to a liquid soap batch.

Which is worth doing for the margin and worth not overdoing: a business built on rebatching its own defects is a business with a molding problem it has stopped noticing.

References