Walmart is the largest retailer in the world, with over 11,500 stores operating under 56 banners in 27 countries. With its massive size and scope, Walmart has significant influence over the products it sells, including baked goods like cakes. This raises the question – does Walmart make their own cakes in-house, or do they rely on third-party commercial bakeries and food manufacturers?
The short answer is that Walmart does not directly make their own cakes to sell in stores. However, they do have stringent requirements for cake suppliers and quality control standards to ensure consistency across their massive cake inventory. Walmart primarily sources cakes and other baked goods from major wholesale commercial bakeries that produce food products on a large scale for retailers, chains, and food service operations.
Walmart’s In-Store Bakery Model
Walmart operates in-store bakeries within many locations that offer fresh cakes, pies, cookies, and breads. However, these on-site bakeries do not actually produce the baked goods from scratch themselves. Instead, they finish off pre-made items delivered to the store in a par-baked or frozen state.
The cakes, breads, and other goods are first baked at offsite commercial facilities and centralized commissary kitchens. They are then delivered partially pre-baked or frozen to Walmart locations where on-site employees thaw them out, decorate them, and complete the baking process in store ovens. This provides the experience of “freshly baked” goods, even though the initial baking is done elsewhere.
So while Walmart in-store bakeries handle the decorating and finishing, they do not make these items completely from scratch on premises. The initial baking production is handled at dedicated third-party commercial bakeries that supply baked goods in bulk to Walmart’s nationwide store network.
Walmart’s Supplier Model
Instead of baking their own cakes at stores or a central commissary, Walmart relies on a massive supply chain of third-party food manufacturers and commercial bakeries to produce cakes and other baked goods for retail sale.
Walmart establishes strict guidelines and requirements that suppliers must adhere to for safety, quality, processes, and more. However, the actual baking and production is handled by the suppliers themselves.
This allows Walmart to maintain consistency and cost efficiency at massive scale by partnering with a few large bakery suppliers, rather than attempting to bake everything in-house themselves. It also provides suppliers with huge volume in bulk sales to Walmart.
Some of the major commercial wholesale bakeries that are known to supply baked goods to Walmart include:
– Flowers Foods – massive baked foods provider that produces brand names like Wonder Bread, Nature’s Own, and Tastykake. They operate 46 bakeries nationwide.
– H&S Bakery – Baltimore-based commercial bakery supplying breads, buns, and rolls at large scale.
– Aunt Millie’s Bakeries – top wholesale commercial bakery supplying breads and rolls to retailers and restaurants.
– Sarah Lee Frozen Bakery – division of food conglomerate JAB Holding Company that supplies frozen baked goods.
– Pepperidge Farm – leading commercial bakery known for breads, cookies, crackers and frozen cakes. Owned by Campbell Soup Company.
Walmart Private Label Cakes
In addition to stocking cakes from name brand commercial bakeries like Sara Lee and Pepperidge Farm, Walmart also has an extensive private label cake range.
Walmart sells store brand cakes under categories like Great Value, Marketside, and Sam’s Choice. These cakes are produced by dedicated suppliers who make them exclusively for Walmart.
The list below shows some of Walmart’s in-house brand cakes and the suppliers believed to bake them:
| Cake Range | Manufacturer |
| Great Value | Alpha Baking Company |
| Marketside | Give and Go Prepared Foods |
| Sam’s Choice | Weston Bakeries |
Alpha Baking Company, Give and Go, and Weston Bakeries are major commercial bakery operations that can support Walmart’s massive volume and distribution needs for its private label cakes.
Working directly with dedicated suppliers gives Walmart tighter control over specifications, quality, processes, and costs for its in-house cake offerings branded Great Value, Marketside, and Sam’s Choice. However, Walmart relies on the suppliers themselves to handle the actual baking and production rather than making the cakes in-house.
Walmart Cake Quality Standards
While Walmart does not bake its own cakes, it does impose stringent supplier guidelines and requirements to ensure the cakes meet quality benchmarks across its stores. Walmart cake standards encompass:
– Recipes – Walmart provides approved recipes for suppliers to strictly follow.
– Ingredients – Walmart maintains lists of required and prohibited ingredients to control contents.
– Production processes – Walmart requires certain proofing, baking, storage, and handling protocols.
– Testing – Walmart requires safety, quality control, and shelf life testing.
– Packaging – Specific packaging formats are required.
– Nutritional requirements – Guidelines for calories, fat, sugar etc.
– Deliver procedures – Strict transport, storage, and stocking processes.
– Ongoing inspections – Suppliers are subject to ongoing site inspections and audits.
By imposing tight supply chain oversight and standardized requirements, Walmart aims to achieve consistency in cake quality and freshness across its thousands of stores nationwide.
Why Walmart Does Not Bake Its Own Cakes
There are some clear logistical reasons why it makes more sense for Walmart to outsource cake production to commercial bakeries rather than attempt to make cakes in-house:
– Scale and distribution – Walmart’s size means huge volumes of cakes. It’s more efficient to work with a few large suppliers than bake in each store.
– Focus – Baking from scratch diverts Walmart from its core retail operations. Specialist bakeries can focus solely on baking.
– Consistency – Third party suppliers can adhere to strict standards for consistent quality across all store locations.
– Costs – Suppliers can achieve better economies of scale in ingredients, labor and equipment.
– Complexity – Baking systems require specialized facilities, climate control, technical skills. It’s complex for a retailer to build in-house.
– Food safety – Commercial bakeries are experienced handling ingredients safely on a mass production scale.
Conclusion
In summary, Walmart does not bake its own cakes sold in stores. The retailer relies on established relationships with major commercial bakeries and food manufacturers like Flowers Foods, Pepperidge Farm, Give and Go, and others to supply cakes to thousands of locations daily.
Walmart dictates ingredients, quality control standards, recipes, packaging, and delivery requirements that suppliers must adhere to. This allows Walmart to ensure consistency and cost efficiency without actually producing baked goods themselves.
By leveraging specialized third-party cake producers, Walmart can focus on its core retail competencies and achieve the scale needed to sell high volumes of cakes every day across its U.S. store network and e-commerce operations.