Christmas Dinner Cake, the quirky cake that contains all the festive trimmings for a traditional Christmas meal (except the turkey), has won its first mainstream listing.
Specialist cake maker Propermaid started supplying Ocado with the £18 cake this week. Ingredients include carrots, parsnips, cranberries and sprouts.
The Christmas Dinner Cake secured £50,000 funding from ‘dragon’ Deborah Meaden after featuring on BBC2’s Dragons’ Den Christmas Special last year.
Available only from deli and foodservice channels until now the listing was a “major achievement” said founder Allison Whitmarsh, who started the business in 2008 from her own kitchen. She plans to grow sales of her ‘cakes with a twist’ to £1m in the next year. “We are in the process of developing a Christmas Dinner Cake kit for next year that will be targeted directly at the big supermarkets,” she said. Propermaid was also developing a range of core occasion cakes based on the brand’s existing unusual flavour combinations, including courgette & lime, beetroot & chocolate and liquorice, dandelion & burdock, which it would be presenting to Ocado early next year, said Whitmarsh.
Continuing to introduce “true innovation” was key, she added.
The Yorkshire-based cake maker, in which Meaden took a 25% stake, grew its staff by six to 22 this year and is planning on adding a further six next year when it is also looking to move to bigger premises, said Whitmarsh.
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