SAY 'CAKE!'

AMY SUNG

Scan-to-print cakes, or cakes with photos on them, have been around for about a decade now, and while some retailers say they no longer find the category lucrative, other bakery departments are brimming with orders during the peak graduation and holiday season.

With students graduating, and Mother's Day and Father's Day occurring during the months of May and June, scan-to-print cake orders are coming in droves at Salt Lake City-based Associated Food Stores' corporate-owned stores and at Marketplace Food and Drug stores, Minot, N.D.

“Graduation is definitely one of the biggest ones,” said Shelly Slaughter, perishables specialist for AFS.

“We've also done some successful promotions with Mother's Day and Father's Day, with the kids coming in. Basically, what we let the kids do is draw a picture for their mother or father, and then we scan it and actually put that [picture] on a cake.”

Slaughter added that the stores can see about a 5%-7% sales increase during weeks when events are tied specifically to scan-to-print cakes. And, during other parts of the year, one AFS bakery has found a niche with the local business community. Local real estate agencies, for example, now come to the store to buy cakes featuring a photo of a house as a gift for new buyers, and a pharmaceutical company buys sugar cookies with its logo printed on them as small gifts for clients.

“Our best store, she's got about five to six orders per day of the photo cakes. She's gone out and really marketed it to some of the businesses in the area and is doing logo cookies as well with it.”

AFS first put five scan-to-print machines into five test stores about three and a half years ago, according to Slaughter.

“Then, as we've remodeled and had different situations come up, we've put them in additional stores. Now, we finally have approval to move forward with the rest of them just because of the success,” Slaughter said.

At Marketplace stores, the cake department has two systems running almost 24 hours a day, seven days a week during graduation time, according to Nyla Stromberg, cake department manager for Marketplace.

“May is absolutely unbelievable,” Stromberg told SN.

“[Since the first weekend in May], we were up major, major amounts over last year.”

Marketplace's cake decorating area is separate from the bakery and offers the option of scan-to-print cakes year-round.

Yet, other bakeries say the novelty of the technology has worn off, and that the expense of maintaining the equipment can outweigh the benefits of taking orders during peak season.

For example, Robert Quintanilla, director of bakery and deli, Scolari's, Sparks, Utah, agreed that this time of year is the best time for scan-to-print cakes, but he also said the stores don't experience much demand for scan-to-print cake orders.

“We don't sell a whole lot of them — they're not worth their money,” Quintanilla said.

“This time of the year is the best time of the year. We try to make sure that all the equipment is working this time of the year, because there's a lot of maintenance required with those kinds of things. The inks will dry up if you don't use it enough.”

Marketplace and AFS' corporate stores, however, both say they quickly saw a return on their investment in the equipment.

For AFS stores, the ROI for the scan-to-print technology takes about three to six months, depending on how aggressively the cakes are promoted, according to Slaughter.

Marketplace agrees that providing this service to customers does bear a return.

“We've definitely seen a return on investment,” Stromberg said. “We don't sell just the image to our customers — we make sure that they have to purchase the cake here for us to put [the image] on the cake. … Unless we have a customer where their child has some sort of allergy like a gluten allergy or something like that, then I will definitely help them out.”

The companies that offer the scan-to-print technology also provide training, assistance with maintenance, the edible image-transfer sheets and licensed images.

DecoPac, an Anoka, Minn.-based company that markets cake decorations to professional cake decorators, provides many retailers with scan-to-print technology. PhotoCake, its system designed to place edible imagery and graphics onto cakes, consists of three components: a scanner, a printer and the controller itself. Within the controller is a DVD-ROM and a media reader, which allows customers to bring their photo in on a disc or on a camera media card.

The current system is called PhotoCake 3, which includes a 15-inch color monitor and proprietary software.

“There's a lot of benefit from it, not just for the consumer, but for the bakery,” said Carlos Davila, project manager, information technology and strategic initiatives, DecoPac.

“For example, our system also prints backgrounds, and in the bakery environment, there sometimes seems to be a lot of turnover. [New employees'] experience may not be great with airbrushing, and our system allows you to print backgrounds,” rather than airbrush them, he said.

Davila said that innovations such as “virtual inventory” for the edible media have also made scan-to-print technology more viable, allowing for less waste, as retailers only order what is needed.

“There is pre-printed edible media that comes in a bag of six or 12. The problem with those is that if you don't use them, they're going to go to waste, because they're going to dry up and get brittle, whereas with the PhotoCake system, you print them out as you need them,” Davila said.

Bakery Crafts, West Chester, Ohio, is another company that offers a scan-to-print system.

“Putting images on a cake is a very good-selling market segment of our business,” said L. Elise Caplan, spokeswoman for Bakery Crafts. “And, we do see an increase in supermarket participation in this type of technology. There are particular occasions. Specifically, graduation is extremely popular with the edible image. Also, it does across the board from birthdays to Mother's Day to all types of events.”

Bakery Craft's system, Copy Confection, has seen steady growth, according to Caplan, and the company is currently testing two new systems with some supermarket bakeries around the country. The company hopes to launch the new system this summer, Caplan added.

“[The new systems] will vastly improve the color output so that the photography is much more vibrant,” Caplan said.

Both Bakery Crafts and DecoPac offer technical support, as well as training sessions that are about two to three hours long.

Stromberg said she calls the company for assistance when the systems go down at Marketplace.

“We've had two computers and two printers go down at the same time at graduation, with 300 orders looking at us in the face. So, we've had some issues, but Bakery Craft helped us through that dilemma last year, so that was really good,” Stromberg said.

For special events, AFS stores will sometimes have special training sessions for the staff that are more marketing-oriented than technical, Slaughter said.

“Sometimes we go out and do a pocket meeting, where we have everybody come in and we walk them through the Mother's Day promotion and do some special training. It's not really technical training, but more marketing training — how to get out there and sell the system to the guests in the stores,” she explained.

Otherwise, using the technology is fairly intuitive, Caplan said.

“Anyone who can use a printer or a computer can use the system,” she said.

Maintenance primarily involves cleaning and covering the printer — because of the flour in the air in most bakeries — and making sure the inks are continuously flowing.

Caplan of Bakery Crafts said that with all of the new things coming out through virtual inventory, she believes the category will continue to grow.

“The offering of frames and backgrounds and presets that are already done for the decorator so that they can just drop in the photo — I think that those libraries will continue to grow as ours has,” Caplan said.

“[The technology] is very cost-effective for the bakery, it's got a good profit margin, it's very popular, so it's a win-win-win.”

Stromberg agreed that the increase in the variety of new things available in virtual inventory creates more opportunity.

“It's really, really busy here, so that's exciting,” Stromberg said.

“I mean, the sky's the limit — I think that decorating is a lot more fun now because there's so much more to work with.”