Should Cafés Bake Their Own Cakes or Buy Wholesale?

But behind most cake counters sits a question café owners eventually ask themselves:

Should we bake our own cakes, or buy them wholesale?

It's a brilliant question to ask as ideally, you want to add your own stamp to your offering that you can be really proud of.

At first glance, baking everything in-house sounds like the obvious choice. Fresh cakes coming out of the oven, the smell of butter and sugar in the air, a sense that everything is made right there in the kitchen. For some cafés that’s absolutely part of the magic. If baking is your thing and you’ve got the time, space and team for it, making your own cakes can give your café a real personality. 

The reality, though, is that baking good cakes consistently takes more time than people expect. Sourcing the right ingredients, mixing, baking, cooling, icing, cutting, storing, it all adds up. In a busy café kitchen where coffee is flying out and lunch service is kicking off, cake production can quietly become a full-time job. Then there’s the issue of consistency. Customers love their favourite slice, but they also expect it to taste the same every time they come in.

That’s why many cafés turn to wholesale cake suppliers. Specialist bakeries spend all day doing one thing well: baking cakes designed for café counters. Buying cakes wholesale takes pressure off the kitchen, frees up staff time and keeps the cake offering reliable week after week. It also means cafés can focus on what they’re really there for; great coffee, good food and happy customers.

In reality, most cafés end up somewhere in the middle. They might bake a couple of signature cakes or special edition cakes themselves and bring in brownies, traybakes or loaf cakes from a bakery. It’s a practical balance that keeps the counter interesting without turning the kitchen into a full-scale cake factory. Although Exploding Bakery cakes are made in large batches, it's still all handmade and has that 'home made' look that we think customers really love.

We also have customers who aren't able to make certain types of cakes in their kitchen, such as gluten free cakes so they often turn to us for the special dietary requirements. It's about making their life easier, and at the same time keeping their customers happy with the range of cakes on offer.

Because in the end, customers rarely ask where the cake was baked. What they care about is much simpler.

They want a slice, something that looks irresistible on the counter, and a cake that tastes brilliant alongside a cup of coffee.

If that box gets ticked, the cake counter is doing exactly what it should.