Pandemic pain leads to new cheesecake desserts for startup Freezcake
For this small business owner, the pandemic was the worst of times but also a push to innovate.
Jenifer Shwartz has been a pastry chef for more than 15 years and owns her own bakery for wholesale clients such as caterers and restaurants. As would be expected, the coronavirus took a massive toll on her business. “Everybody shut their doors. Nobody was buying desserts anymore. And, of course, all my events were canceled.”
Shwartz initially used the time to develop a new offering to sell to her clients when business reopened — Japanese cheesecake and pastries — and was about to roll that out in the summer of 2020 when she got severely sick with COVID-19. She had this inventory of cheesecakes ready to go out the door when she was whisked to a hospital intensive care unit. “And so I told my employee at the [Hollywood] bakery to take our entire inventory of cheesecakes and freeze-dry the cakes and that’s how the concept was created.”
The resulting freezedried cheesecake was super crunchy, she said, and “low calorie, low sugar. We even have a keto option.”
Once she recovered, she focused on her new company, Freezcake, which launched as a snack pack in December. Startup Freezcake is first runner-up in the 2022 Miami Herald
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Competition’s Florida International University track.
It’s not her first product. She created a line called Oh My Cookie Pie, big cookies stuffed with chocolate ganache or other flavors that restaurants warm up and sell with a scoop of ice cream. What’s more, while in college at FIU, she created the spice recipe that Badia now sells called Holy Smokes. A portion of sales benefits the university.
For now, Freezcake (freezcake.com) is producing about 100 products a day — each product is the size of a slice of cheesecake, but freeze-dried it is more like a snack. “It’s meant to be consumed in one sitting and it actually fills you up because it’s very high protein.”
Shwartz produces both freeze-dried Japanese and New York-style cheesecakes for about $5 a package.
Shwartz is seeking an investment to take Freezcake from 3,500 bags some months to 50,000 bags a month, which will enable her to attract large clients.
With longtime ties to South Florida, Shwartz is excited to see Miami growing into a food hub. “My dream is to walk into a convenience store and Freezcakes are being sold near the register, a healthy impulse buy,” she said.