Wholesale Handler
Easter moves by up to three weeks from one year to the next
Christmas Day is 25 December in every year, so a Christmas order calendar carries over with only the weekdays changing. Easter does not. Western Easter Sunday is 28 March in 2027, 16 April in 2028, 1 April in 2029 and 21 April in 2030: a nineteen-day jump between the first two and a twenty-day jump between the last two. The extremes are 22 March and 25 April, 34 days apart.
Week numbers are worthless as a plan, and the schedule is rebuilt backwards from Easter Sunday each year. The compression is sharper than Christmas too: the trade buys inside a short window, and a hot cross bun or a foil-wrapped egg has no value on the Tuesday after.
Standing up the Easter range
The range is ordinary products in the catalogue with dates around them, not a separate system. In Wholesale Handler an availability window carries a reason and a customer-facing note, so a simnel cake that sits in the catalogue but is not yet orderable shows the note explaining when it opens instead of disappearing from the order form. The same window closes the line again after Easter. Keeping the products year round and moving their dates makes next year a date change rather than a rebuild.
A trade-only range stays trade-only because the public storefront draws from its own storefront price list. A product left out of that list is orderable by invited accounts and invisible to the public.
How to take wholesale pre-orders for a seasonal product covers taking orders for stock that has not been made yet, and Chocolatier wholesale order management for a small business sets this range alongside the other peaks a chocolatier builds a year around.
Setting a cutoff that protects the production run
An everyday bakery cutoff is measured against a packing morning: Friday lunchtime for a Saturday run. An Easter cutoff is measured against the point the run stops being changeable, which is earlier. For a bakery that is the flour, the dried fruit and the rostered labour. For a chocolatier it is further out: ANZ reports the cocoa in an Easter egg on a shelf was bought six to twelve months earlier, and Hotel Chocolat puts its own range development twelve to eighteen months ahead. At artisan scale that is weeks rather than months, but the commitment still comes well before packing day.
In Wholesale Handler the cutoff belongs to an order profile, set once for the whole profile or separately per delivery day, so the Good Friday run can close a week out while the Tuesday-after run stays open until the weekend.
The maximum lead time on the same profile is the setting that catches people. It caps how far ahead an order may be placed, so a profile tuned for weekly bread will refuse an Easter order placed in January.
Orders consolidate into a production schedule: a quantity of dough and a count of moulds rather than a pile of orders. How to turn wholesale orders into a production list covers that step, and How to set wholesale order cutoffs for a peak season covers the general shape of a seasonal cutoff.
Setting a minimum that makes a small stockist worth baking for
A seasonal line carries setup cost a weekly line does not: a separate proof, a set of moulds, a foil and box order with its own minimum quantity. Minimum spend and delivery charge sit on the order profile alongside the cutoff, so an Easter profile can carry a higher minimum than the weekly bread profile without touching the weekly one. The minimum is checked per order, so two small orders from one account do not combine to clear it.
Staging delivery days through Holy Week
Hot cross buns are a Good Friday item, so a shop wants them Thursday or Friday morning. Eggs and moulded figures want to be on display a week or more before. That is one range with two delivery patterns, which is what accepted delivery days per order profile are for: a cafe on the Thursday, a farm shop on the Saturday, a delicatessen on both.
The UK and US calendars differ here. In England and Wales, Good Friday and Easter Monday are both bank holidays (26 and 29 March in 2027, 14 and 17 April in 2028). Neither day appears on the US federal holiday list under 5 U.S.C. 6103, so a US Good Friday is an ordinary working Friday. Global holiday and blackout dates close the days you are not running, and a closed day stops taking orders rather than collecting them for a van that is not going out.
Wholesale bakery customer delivery days covers assigning days across a book of accounts.
Handling an addition after the flour is committed
Once the cutoff passes, the delivery date locks, and the merchant-authored cutoff message is the copy the customer reads at that moment. An Easter one can say what to do instead: a phone number, a named exception, or a flat no.
Where extra was baked, optional stock tracking holds the surplus count and the per-product notification emails the accounts waiting on it. When it runs out, closing the availability window stops the product taking orders that cannot be filled.
There is no deposit, and no season that follows Easter by itself
Wholesale Handler takes no money. There is no deposit, no card on file and no prepayment, so an Easter commitment from a new account is not secured with cash up front. What secures it is the cutoff and the invoice after delivery, with payment tracked by the customer declaring a payment and the merchant confirming or disputing it.
The recurring seasonal availability setting repeats on fixed calendar dates: available 1 March to 30 April, every year. That tracks asparagus. It cannot follow a date fixed by a lunar rule, so the Easter window is set by hand each year.
Taking the range down
Close the availability window with a note giving the date the range returns, and pull the Easter products from the storefront price list so the public page stops showing a product nobody can buy.
Last year's Easter price is not automatically this year's. Cocoa peaked near $10,000 to $11,000 a tonne across 2024 and 2025 and had fallen to $3,000 to $4,000 by early 2026, so an Easter price set two seasons ago is priced against a different input. A price updated in the last thirty days shows the old figure struck through beside the new one on the order form, so the change reaches the buyer while they are ordering rather than on the invoice.
