PHILADEPHIA — Costs related to the sale of older facilities and the optimization of the new Navy Yard facility weighed down Tasty Baking results during the third quarter.

For the quarter ended Sept. 25 the company suffered a loss of $4,940,000, which compared with a loss of $500,000 during the same quarter of the previous year. The company had sales of $40,370,000, down 7% from $43,584,000 during the same quarter of the previous year.

“The third quarter of 2010 proved to be challenging for us in terms of optimizing the new facility and those challenges limited our ability to drive top-line growth during the first half of the quarter,” said Charles P. Pizzi, president and chief executive officer. “During the third quarter, the production limitations negatively impacted gross sales by approximately $4.0 million. By the end of the third quarter of 2010, virtually all of these production limitations had been resolved and as of today they are having no material impact on the business.While we have removed those barriers to growing the top line, we continue to focus on completing the optimization of the Navy Yard facility during the fourth quarter of 2010.

“The sale of our aged Hunting Park and Fox Street facilities in September 2010 was an important milestone in the transformation of our company and allowed us to increase our focus on the operational optimization of the Navy Yard facility. During the third quarter we incurred approximately $4.4 million in additional costs related to the transition to and optimization of the new facility, but have made significant progress since the beginning of the third quarter. When we began construction of the new bakery we indicated that the benefits would mainly be derived from reductions in labor as well as lower utility, maintenance and infrastructure spending, combined with improvements in operational efficiency in the form of lower waste.”

For the nine months ended Sept. 25, the company had a loss of $12,194,000, which compared with net income of $1,743,000, equal to 21c per share on the common stock, during the same period of the previous year. Sales during the nine months totaled $127,032,000, down 7% from $136,704,000.