Cake sales boom as buyers seek treats
THE arrival of lockdown seemed like the end, at least temporarily, of cake business Kelly’s Kitchen.
‘Everyone was postponing their weddings and birthday celebrations and I closed as I didn’t know what the future would hold,’ says Kelly Da Silva Fernandes, who set up her Hertfordshire-based business in March last year after a career in marketing.
She adds: ‘I had zero income for eight weeks, but kept in touch with my customers by doing live bake-alongs on Facebook with my children.’
She reopened three weeks ago and has been ‘totally floored by the response’. She says: ‘I’ve never seen demand so high. My website crashed and when I offered boxes of home-made cupcakes, I sold out in four minutes.’
Customers pay online and pick up the cakes from a table outside her house at a specific time, thereby sticking to social distancing guidelines – and income is now three times what it was before the lockdown.
Kelly, who bakes daily after homeschooling is done for the day, puts her success down to switching from larger cakes to luxury cupcakes with flavours such as passion fruit martini (which includes a pipette of vodka) or salted caramel.
Her Father’s Day boxes with Guinness and chocolate are likely to be equally popular.
‘People just want to have a little treat,’ she says. ‘Everyone’s been through so much.
‘Now people can get out more they’re buying a box and sharing it with a friend over a picnic which is lovely.
‘I just wish I could meet more of the demand – I definitely need another shelf for the oven.’