Published on the 26/05/2017 | Written by Donovan Jackson
Swept to international reality TV attention, Carlo’s Bakery digitised rapidly…
It was a neighbourhood business but today Carlo’s Bakery is well known globally to fans of the reality TV show ‘Cake Boss’. Less common knowledge is that the bakery’s international success is driven by a hotbed of technology innovation.
That’s owing in part to a massively expanded operation which took an already successful local company to international fame – and therein lies valuable lessons for every organisation with growth aspirations.
The first thing iStart asked Leo Minervini, CIO at Carlos Bakery, is ‘what is the role of IT at the bakery’; after all, the production of custom cakes doesn’t immediately conjure up imagery of tech support. “In today’s day and age, we have very tech savvy, mobile savvy customers. It is imperative for every business, but particularly a bakery selling edible goods and an experience domestically and internationally, to leverage available technology in various ways,” he said.
There’s the ‘usual’ stuff for an at-scale business, such as ERP and supply chain, but where Minervini said there is a special focus is on driving customer experience. “Customer feedback and the voice of the customer is extremely important to us as a business. We are selling products but more than that we are selling an experience – we need that feedback to tell us how we are doing, to let us know if we are meeting expectations.”
He gave an idea of the scale of the business: “The Bakery initially had one location which has operated for 100 years in Hoboken, New Jersey. Eight years ago, because of the Cake Boss show, it went to a whole new level with popularity and demand from new customers wanting to experience the baked sweets which had been sold on the local market for many years.”
Today, he said, Carlo’s Bakery has over 550 employees working in the bakery side of the business, while the enterprise that Buddy Valastro built which includes restaurants and a television production company employs over 1,000 people. The company operates across 19 locations in the USA (one is in South America) and has a 125,000-square foot commissary and offices which comprise its New Jersey HQ. It has plans to open up to 12 additional retail locations in the next year to 18 months.
The eponymous ‘Cake Boss’ – Buddy Valastro – recognised the opportunity to grow and scale with the TV show; soon after the production first went to air, he brought in Minervini as one of his initial key executive hires.
Said Minervini: “Previously, we were a very paper-driven business. That was fine, but, for example, when the influx of cake orders went through the roof, we were dealing with hand written notes. That meant assumptions, mistakes, lost notes and missed orders, or orders which were made multiple times or just incorrectly. We learned from that and quickly delivered a cake order system – a digital version – and now we run reports and analytics against that,” he explained.
Minervini said customer experience is so important because the organisation recognises that it is in the ‘celebratory business’. “Whether for personal or business reasons, customers come to us when they are celebrating a milestone. What we’ve found is that we can extract a lot of value from CRM systems – but the technology is only ever as good as the humans behind it who are pumping the data in.”
He said the business has gone through multiple growing pains in its transition from paper to digital processes, but with a 360-degree view of customers, it has taken strides to being able to deliver a consistent experience to a vastly expanded number of customers. “Customers feel that we know them and understand them. That’s essential if we are to celebrate with them and hit on all cylinders with customer satisfaction.”
