Commercial and Retail Bakeries NAICS 311811, 311812

Apr 20, 2025 - Winning Wedding Business

• Wedding season is approaching and bakeries looking to establish steady wedding traffic should befriend wedding planners and venue coordinators to drive business their way, according to Retail Bakers of America (RBA). These gatekeepers are influential in steering business to vendors through their recommendations. RBA suggests bakeries looking to establish themselves as a go-to choice for wedding cakes drop off a box of samples at local venues or planners’ offices. To sell couples on your bakery, RBA recommends making tastings an experience, highlighting your best cake flavors and creating an inviting ambiance. Charging a small fee for the tasting that can go toward the final order is a good way to weed out free sample hunters. According to The Knot, in 2024 the average cost of a wedding cake was $540. Beyond the cake, offering a dessert table package is an easy way to upsell.
• Soaring snack cake sales have prompted Wonder Bread-maker Flowers Foods to launch a line of cupcakes, donuts, and other sweet treats, marking the company’s first brand extension in its 104-year history, Food Dive reports. Dollar sales of snack cakes have grown rapidly over the past five years, from $1 billion in 2019 to nearly $1.6 billion in 2023, according to Circana data cited by the National Confectioners Association. (While some of the dollar gain reflects inflation, unit sales have increased and are well above pre-pandemic levels.) “Snack cake sales are a bright spot in the bakery aisle, outpacing the overall cake market with robust, double-digit growth,” Cargill marketing manager Wendy Osborn told Food Dive. Consumers continue to show an appetite for snacking and indulgent treats and Flowers Foods’ new line of cinnamon rolls, mini donuts, honey buns, and cupcakes fits squarely within that space, according to Food Dive.

• Consumers looking to reduce their sugar consumption are checking labels for natural sweeteners that don’t compromise on the taste or texture of baked goods, Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery (SF&WB) reports. So called “clean-label” sweeteners include monk fruit, stevia, and organic date syrup made from concentrated date juice. Organic date syrup contains fiber, natural sugars (such as glucose and fructose), vitamins, and minerals and can substitute for sugar in baking due to its sweetness and moisture-retaining properties, according to SF&WB. Tagatose – a naturally occurring sugar found in various foods – is 90% as sweet as sucrose with 60% fewer calories. Tagatose also has a low glycemic index (GI of 3), a ketogenic certification, and is non-GMO Project Verified. A bulking sweetener, tagatose delivers both sweetness and textural properties. Bakers who innovate to cater to consumers looking to cut sugar without sacrificing taste and texture are likely to gain new customers.
• Farmers in the world’s top cocoa-producing regions are abandoning their crops despite high record prices, The Wall Street Journal reports. A combination of bad weather, disease, and failed government policies – intended to protect cocoa farmers from volatile swings in global markets – has farmers in Ghana and Ivory Coast uprooting their cocoa crops and reseeding their fields. Cacao swollen shoot virus, a disease that causes root necrosis and kills cocoa trees, has afflicted cocoa crops in recent years. Another factor in farmers’ decisions to abandon cocoa is faulty government policies, including a fixed price that the countries pay farmers for their beans that’s prevented growers from profiting on the price rise, WSJ reports. Cocoa production in Ivory Coast dropped 22% during the 12-month season that ended Sept. 30, from the same period a year earlier, while Ghana’s output plunged 27% over the same period, according to the International Cocoa Organization.