AN D’Hynenzio, AP Business Writer
NEW YORK (AP) – Inside a Walmart store in New Jersey, workers place finish touches on cakes and edible ink spongebobs on top. A colleague creates a buttercream rosette border for another cake, while another colleague covers the tier of the layer that will become a triple deck dessert with frost.
It’s graduation season and the busiest time for 6,200 employees trained by the nation’s largest retailer who trained hand-decorated cakes for each customer’s order. The cake itself comes in a variety of shapes and sizes, pre-made, frozen, and from suppliers, rather than from Walmart’s in-store bakeries.
But sugar doesn’t invite the importance the company places on its custom cake business. That ice artisan army is the highest paying hourly workers at a typical US Walmart except managers. Cake decorators earn an average of $19.25 an hour compared to $18.25 for all non-controlled store workers, a company spokesperson said.
Melissa Fernandez, 36, was in Walmart’s wireless services division in North Bergen, New Jersey, and later transferred to the Deli area in search of a better salary. However, Fernandez turned his eyes to cake decorating work and spent two months training by a colleague in the store, she picked up a piping bag full-time in 2021.
“I love burning at home. I love painting,” Fernandez said. “I love doing artistic things and I’ve always wanted to be a part of it,” she said 11 years later at Walmart, and now she’s making around $24.40 an hour.
Employees will make cakes at Walmart Supercenter in North Bergen, New Jersey on Wednesday, May 28th, 2025 (AP Photo/AndrescuDucky)
The cake is on display at the Walmart Supercenter in North Bergen, New Jersey (AP Photo/Andrescudukki) on Wednesday, May 28th, 2025
Employees will decorate cakes at Walmart Supercenter in North Bergen, New Jersey (AP Photo/Andrescudukki) on Wednesday, May 28th, 2025.
Cakes will be on display at the Walmart Supercenter in North Bergen, New Jersey on Wednesday, May 28th, 2025 (AP Photo/Andres kudacki)
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Employees will make cakes at Walmart Supercenter in North Bergen, New Jersey on Wednesday, May 28th, 2025 (AP Photo/AndrescuDucky)
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Despite his elite status within Walmart, retailer cake decorators have attracted detractors on social media.
The company promotes personalized baked goods in Tiktok, and the workers behind such works do the same with their profiles. Due to the growing popularity of content, critics have accused Walmart decorators of stealing ideas and covering the work of professional cake artists with low-cost products.
After Tiktok’s video praised Walmart’s $25 heart-shaped cake with a border similar to vintage lace before this year’s Valentine’s Day, they created their own video explaining why the cake charges more and why it criticizes Walmart.
The debate continued in the comments section on whether Walmart represented the evil of capitalism or whether it met the needs of the masses.
Customized sheet cakes that can be sliced to serve 96 people are priced at Walmart at $59, and are about a third to half the price that a national sample of independent bakeries lists online for cakes of similar sizes. For an additional $5.20, Walmart customers can add a filling of either a vendor supplemented strawberry or “Bavarian cream” like a bare cake.
The slices of the celebration opportunity cake market held by Walmart seem to be enormous based on the person the company offers. One of the four cakes sold in the US comes from Walmart, whose employees collectively display more than a million cakes in May and June.
Compared to school graduations of 30-35 a day, the number of cakes decorated daily in places where Fernandez works is almost doubled to 50-60 when school graduation comes. He praises the decorators’ talent and promotional activities in Tiktok.
“We’ve got a lot of repeat customers. We’re doing more business just because of the sense of the virus,” DeMarco said.
The Tiktok video that showed Fernandez designing a $24 version of a customized bouquet cake – 12 cupcakes individually decorated and arranged to look like flowers – has received nearly half a million views. The bouquet design was one of the most popular cakes at North Bergen Store last month, a company spokesperson said.
She said not only cakes that resemble meals like sushi, spaghetti and meatballs, but also dressy heart-shaped cakes are popular. Fernandez also created the “Burn Away” cake. I created an ice cake topped with an image printed on paper.
“Titktok helps me stay up to date,” she said. “A lot of the trends I see there are customers coming to ask about it within that week or within that month. And we’re pretty up to date too.”
Jazzing cakes with your hands requires skill, whether someone else has baking them or not, she said. Fernandez explained that whipping up buttercream frosting with tips on piping in bags and various sizes to produce the desired design without misguided blobs is not the same as paintings or paintings.
“There are a lot of pressure points you need to practice in order to get the boundaries right and the right thickness or texture,” she said.
Tiffany Wicke, a Walmart cake decorator since July 2016 and working at a store in Springfield, Missouri, has over 912,000 followers in Tiktok. The job attracts people who can be “very skilled and talented,” and adds that customers want more and more complex designs.
“When I first started, it was basically just boundaries and writing,” she said. “Now everyone wants more and more of their cake.”
Liz Berman, owner of a sleepy bakery in Natic, Massachusetts, said he doesn’t worry about losing customers to Walmart due to the premium ingredients he uses with attention to detail.
She charges over $205 for a half-sized sheet cake. A bouquet made up of two dozen miniature cupcakes costs $110. All the cakes are made from scratch and Berman said he designs everything himself.
“It’s a completely different business model,” she said. “Everything I do is habit.”
For Walmart, Cake Decorating Business offers higher profit margins than other regions, including food and electronics, according to Cohen Marshal Cohen, chief retail advisor at market research firm Circana. But it also resonates with shoppers looking for affordable luxury.
“We went when consumers were saying, ‘This is enough,'” Cohen said.
Customers interviewed at Northbergen Store on a recent weekday seem to be happy. George Alango, 34, picked up two customized cakes to celebrate his colleague’s retirement, the other to celebrate his colleague for another job. After researching prices on various store websites, he decided to give it a try at Walmart.
“The prices are great,” he said. “I’m walking for $40 with two cakes.”
Original issue: June 6, 2025, 1:22pm EDT
