Piece o’ cake
The best thing since sliced bread? Try Woolies’ new cake slices – cut with crazy precision using a water jet (IKR!?) and available in four flavours. Product developer René Simatos spills the tea...
Waterworks
The cake slices are cut using a waterjet slicer – an industrial tool that uses an extremely high-pressure jet of water, focused into a beam by a nozzle to cut the slices to precision without any damage.
Raw materials
Not surprisingly, Woolies uses only the best ingredients for their slices. The sponges are made using butter and freerange eggs. Their carrot cake slices contain real cream cheese, fresh cream and a lemon yuzu curd. The rainbow slice is coloured with natural food colouring and filled with a decadent, sustainably sourced white chocolate mousse. The chocolate caramel slice sandwiches vanilla and chocolate sponge with an in-house steamed caramel, and is dusted with Rainforest Alliance Certified cocoa powder.
Military precision René and her team treat the baking of their cakes as a science. Take the rainbow cake slice:
each of the 100% natural food dyes are weighed on a micro scale before being folded into the vanilla batter to achieve the correct colour. When the sponges emerge from the oven, they’re checked against a Pantone colour
chart to ensure the colours are consistent.
Teamwork makes the dream work
There are 24 dedicated team members working on Woolies’ new line of cake slices:
two product developers, three food technologists, four bakers, four cake assemblers,
one waterjet operator, six people to package the slices, and three quality controllers.
Handmade with care The baked sponges and fillings are layered by hand according to a set of product specifications determined
by René and her team. There are several checkpoints during assembly to ensure the team is on track. Once the cake slices have been cut by the waterjet, they’re packaged by hand
to make their way to the store.
Start to finish The whole product development process for Woolies’ cake slices
took 270 days. Now the team produces an average of 2 700 slices a day to keep up with
customer demand.