Company Blog

Idea of the month: Have your cake and extra sales too.

by Adam Zack — June 15, 2016

Cake Parfaits with fresh fruit.

Grocers have had to find ways to turn spoils into something sellable pretty much since the beginning of our industry. Damaged tomatoes, over-ripe avocados and past-their-prime tomatoes become guacamole. Dark steaks become “Our secret marinade”. Stale baguettes transform into garlic crisps and croutons. Bruised melons morph into ready-to-eat cut fruit. It goes on and on. Without managing our shrink (also known as spoils, but spoils doesn’t sound like anything you’d want to eat, no matter what the form, so let’s call it shrink), prices would have to rise and profits would become even smaller. It’s one of the basic tenets of retailing. So leave it to the genius of the grocer to utilize bakery shrink in a way that blew me away. Karen McMullen, Human Resource Manager/Bakery Director of Jensen’s Foods www.jensensfoods.com (how’s that for a wide swath of job responsibilities?) takes her retail bakery managers to see other store bakeries and brainstorm ideas every six months. On one recent trip one of the managers came up with the idea of “Cake Cups” or “Cake Parfaits”. The idea was to utilize leftover cakes scraps and trimmings and layer them with icing in a clear cup, maybe throw on some decoration and sell them for $2.99 a pop. Add some fresh fruit and some custard, and Bam!, you have a $3.99 or $4.99 impulse dessert. Take it further and do holiday themed cake cups and have created an item where the cakes scraps can’t keep up with the demand. AND, the cake and icing cups don’t need refrigeration, so they can be merchandised on deli counters or at checkout. When I told Karen how awesome the idea was, she kind of downplayed it, then threw in ‘Oh, and now we are doing Pie Cups with the day-old pies.” Wow.