Do you want to start a cake business online and want to ship them safely, but can't figure how to?
Here is How to ship a cake!
Hey guys, it's Damien, from MARKETING FOOD ONLINE. I am answering a question that, uh, I've actually had about a week ago, two weeks ago from some of my subscribers. The video you're about to watch is a step by step tutorial of how to ship a cake without it getting damaged. And how does she for literally about $2 in supplies without buying a, uh, expensive cooler box or anything insulated, I'm going to show you exactly how I've been doing it for nearly 10 years now. So you need to watch this video all the way through, because it's literally going to give you step by step all the way to the end, even on how to seal and close the box to ensure that it stays cold. So the video is about 13 minutes long. So if you have 13 minutes of time, take a look at this and don't pause it or stop it unless you of course need to do that, but make sure you try to watch it all the way through and get all of the information because it's literally a step by step.
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MARKETING FOOD ONLINE
So I hope this video, what I'm about to show you is it helps out, Hey guys, Damien from marketing food online. I hope you guys are having another great day. Uh, this video is actually going to be a followup to, um, how to ship, um, chocolate items during the summertime, or even shipping food items that have the potential to melt, or maybe a little trickier to pack and ship like a cake. So how to ship a cake. I'm actually going to show you how we do it. We've been doing this for about 10 years now. Um, and it is the best method that I've kind of come across the first few times that I did this. I had a learning experience if you want to call it that. Um, and the cake did not exactly arrive all that great, but through trial and error, um, I was able to figure out and kind of formulate the best way to get a cake and ship it.
Now, there are a few things that I'm going to recommend you not do. Okay. There are certain types of frosting, certain types of items. It seems on cakes that do not make for a good cake to be shipped. What do I mean by that? As you know, if you're a Baker or if you make cakes or if you make cookies or whatever it may be. Um, there are certain types of toppings that just don't make good shipping during, in transit. They don't, we don't really arrive the way they should, if you will. The condition of the cake and the top of the icing, it gets horribly messed up. Well, the type of cakes that we ship, they have a buttercream frosting that is frozen. When we make the cake, here's how we do it. We bake the cake and we take the buttercream processing and we put it on and we have a variety of flavors.
You can flavor it however you want to. Okay. But we have one, that's a lemon cake. We have a German chocolate cake that doesn't really have a buttercream frosting, but the type of, of, of, uh, coating that we put on the German chocolate cake that I seen, um, with the coconut and all that good stuff, freezes very, very well. Okay. There are some types of frostings, like the kind you go to a bakery and you see those beautiful cakes with that really kind of soft, very well designed, very pretty, very intricate design, top ice scenes. They do not ship well. So if that is the type of frosting that you use, this video is not going to help you out because I'm not recommending you. Those types of cakes. Now, if you make a cake, you can transition. You can kind of change the recipe ever so slightly to make a buttercream frosting that you can freeze.
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Okay? Once you freeze the cake, it is perfectly solid. It is rock hard, solid. And then I'm going to go over here and I'm gonna show you in our shipping area, how we actually ship those types of cakes. Okay. Now for the demo purposes, um, I don't have a cake at the moment right now to show you, but I do have something that's comparable to it and it's going to be this. No, I know that's a steel bowl. That's on a Baker's board. Okay. But it'll serve the purpose of this explanation and I can show you exactly how to ship this without getting damaged. Okay. So let me put this down and I'm going to get to explaining, let me turn this off one second and I'll turn it right back on. Okay guys. I'm back. That was quick. That was fast. Alright. So the video, as I said, it's a little unorthodox.
I'm kind of just moving the camera around, but the information I'm giving you is much more valuable than how pre this video looks. Okay. So here is how we ship the cake. Okay. Number one, we have two sizes of round cakes. I do not ship any square cakes, rectangular case. I just, now this method can be used for that, but I just got to be honest with you. I don't ship anything. That's square. It's just round. It's two sizes. We have a nine inch. That is the size of this banker's board is nine inch. Now, when I ship it on this, it goes right up to the edge of the round Baker board. Oh, Baker's board. This is a guy then replica. It's a ball. Cause I don't have a cake right now, but I want it to make the video and get this information to you guys.
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As soon as I could, this replicates kind of our six inch, which is our small round cake. Okay. Now of course there's always shrink wrap. Let's see this doesn't move. Like I showed you in my, in my video on how to ship cookies, shrink, wrap it to the board. It doesn't go anywhere. Okay. So just imagine this as a six inch round cake. Okay, here we go. Now the box size and I would recommend you use is 12 by 12 by eight, eight. Okay. What are you using? Is the free, these are free priority mailbox. This is 12 by 12 by eight. It is a square box. It is eight inches tall. Okay. Top to bottom eight inches. All right. And what I do is I line it. Let me show you how I line this. Get yourself bubble wrap. Really quick side note don't ever use peanuts.
Those little peanuts are styrofoam peanuts for two reasons. Number one, they shift too much in shipping. Okay. And when you shift it with a cake, if you have any movement, too much movement, that cake will, will arrive in a disaster. Okay? Don't use the peanuts. The second reason. Why is that? They create a mess. Your customer will get annoyed. I've had this before. I've had emails from customers. When I first started, I used to think, wow, you know, those peanuts are cheap. The little styrofoam beads, you pour them into the box. It's a lot more, uh, um, saves a lot more money. It's cheaper. It's annoying. Okay. It's annoying for your customers. Just don't do it. That's my recommendation. If you want to use them, good luck. Let me know how many times you get negative feedback.
One of your customers, okay.
Bomber at peanuts. Why don't you use this? Watch. I'm gonna
Align the box with this. And when I say line it,
This is what I mean. You see that? So side to side, it goes down inside, down inside the box and you create a nice soft cushion. This is just the beginning. This stuff also is super cheap. I'm going to put links in the description where you can get this in bulk. It's ultra cheap. Okay. Line the box like this 12 by 12 by eight. Okay.
Alright.
You take your, your cake. Okay. Now here's the, um, here's the chip. I'm grabbing some of this. Sorry about my clothes stuff on my face. Paper newsprint. I'll also put a link for this, everything that I'm going to talk about for you guys to do exactly what I'm doing. It'll be in the description. You guys can click on it. Take a look at what it is. If you want to order it. Great. If you have another way of doing it, good luck. So crumble it up. I use about three pieces on top of this, on the bottom. Now why do I use three pieces? Because this stuff is like about a half a penny. When you buy it in bulk, half a penny, a sheet or something to that effect. It's very cheap. And it also creates a great cushion. So you have your star phone in your box, your paper writing in there and make it nice and full. And don't worry about it being all bushy and gushy. Okay. That's a good word. Grisha okay. Anyways, but this cake, you take the cake and we're going to set it inside here.
Okay. We'll give it a nice little push down. Now, take a look at how it looks going again. This is a cake. It's not, you're not shipping a bowl inside of here. You have the cake. Now you have space around it. That's why I said 12 by 12. And I'm going to go over that. There's another reason why now let me go get my ice packs really quick. Okay guys. All right. I had to go over to get the freezer in our, in our baking section. Okay. So this is the ice pack that I use. It's actually a gel pack. These are not filled with water. Water has a tendency to melt faster. These are filled with a, it's a, um, it's a gel pack. It's reusable. It's a nontoxic type of ice pack. Okay. And again, I'll show you where the link is. You can again, take a look at these.
You can buy these in bulk, ultra cheap. How much are these? I get them for around with shipping and everything. It's about 20 cents, 25 cents, 30 cents. Maybe each. So if you're worried about, I use four of them and I won't explain to you why for these little ice packs, about three ounces, three to four ounces, roughly each. Okay. Now four of them at four we'll add obviously one pound in shipping. Okay. If you want to, this is what I do. I pass this cost on to my customer. It's just how you do business. And this cost me about 20 or 30 cents each. So four of them. It's about a dollar. Okay. Let's just say a dollar, go up $1 on your price of your product. Whenever you're shipping, whatever cake. And nobody's going to make a big deal about a buck. Okay. So how do you put these in here to make sure that the cake that you made that's frozen?
How do you get it to make sure it keeps it cool because I use two day priority mail. I don't use ups. I don't use FedEx way too expensive. The U S P S I have I've had probably let's say out of a hundred cakes shipped. I'd probably like 99, maybe 97% of the time. No problem. Okay. You're going to have that one or two issues that may come up. No business is perfect. That's how it works. Take these. And you set them around the perimeter of the cake. I'm going to show you what I need.
Okay. Now I'm going to just pick up the camera because I can't, I'm not going to pick this up. Do you guys see that? That right there? Okay. See how I have it around there. Now I'm going to, I'm going to fill this up with packing paper and I'll show you, but that is that right there is how you kind of have it. You want to have it look, go around the sides like this. Now watch again. Sorry for the unorthodox video, but it's not all perfect. So the ice packs around there right now, I'm going to take my paper again. This is what I do.
And I put it around the outside of the ice packs. Let the ice packs touch the kid.
They don't hurt the cake. By the way, you don't do any of that. So just fill this up. You'll probably use about
Six, seven more sheets. Again, these are penny. Don't worry about these up. And then I'm going to show you again, how you can get them
The idea. And then I'll, I'll package this up and show you that the complete. So this, this is how it looks. Okay. So you had the paper on the outside, the ice packs, the cake, the cake, right cake in the middle ice packs. Got it. That's how it works. And then all this empty space, that empty space, you can either fill it with more newsprint. If you want, or just more bubble wrap. Now you want to keep it packed. So it's from it's, there's no movement, but you don't want to make it like rock hard. Okay. And you don't want to make it. So the point that if the box gets dropped, remember you got, this is a little bit of a science tip. Everything has energy to it. If you drop a box, there's going to be some ramifications. They're going to be some energy coming up to the box. Now, if you have it super tight and rigid, and there's no little bit of wiggle room, that cake is gonna absorb that hit, and that's going to damage the cake. So don't get nervous about it. Don't kind of overanalyze or overthink it, but just fill it up to the point where it's just nice and snug, but you've got a little bit of wiggle room. Okay? And that my friends
Is how we shift the cake.
It's a two day priority. Now, listen, this is a something else I use two day priority. If I ship it on Monday, it gets picked up. It's got four ice packs. Those gel packs are actually gonna stay cool for about 48 hours. It's actually how they're advertised. They actually promote them that way. 24 to 48 hours. It's normally about 48 hours. To be honest with you, especially when you're dealing with four. So when you seal it, this is the final trick. When you seal up this box, you want to tape around the edges and I'm going to show you what I mean, because it creates a cooler. Now I'll take a look. There's the box. Alright, here we go. Here's the tape. Now
You're going to go across the bar and you see her
Just right here. This OpenEdge, not this edge, obviously that's closed. You're opening it.
The police,
You want to make this like a cooler. So they have to be closed here. This keeps in all the cool air from the ice packs. Now you have a cooler box. You're good to go. This is how it's done. Okay. Now I had some questions about the expense of using a cooler ice pack with styrofoam and all that. You don't need those. You can use them, but you don't need them. This creates exactly the same thing. You see how it's sealed. So this box right now is free. The box from the priority 12 by 12, by eight is free. The bubble wrap costs, you pennies, the newsprint costs you pennies, the ice pack costs you like about a dollar or so from all four of them. So I just created a cooler pack that you would pay six, seven, $8, maybe four or $5 for creative for about two bucks.
Okay. That's how I've been doing it. That's how we always do it. I don't pay for ridiculous price cooler boxes, unless your cake is like a thousand dollars a cake. Well, good luck with that. But, um, so anyways, that's how I do it. Um, and I would definitely say, do not. Let me just move my camera down, do not buy boxes or those cooler boxes. You don't need them. Okay. And if you want to, if you can try to play with your recipe, the reason why I use those types of icings and frostings is the fact that when I ship it, it's rock solid and I shrink wrap it. It won't affect the cake. Okay. If you have a soft, cushy icing, don't even bother shipping the cake, you can deliver them locally or something. Don't ship them. They're going to arrive damaged. So there are certain types of frosting, certain types of toppings that were great. I hope that video kind of explained exactly how to do it. And I hope you watch the whole video through, uh, because step-by-step, that is about as cheap as you can do it and you can get your cake to arrive perfectly. So thank you guys. And I hope that helped out if it did, please give me a big thumbs up. If you have questions about packing as always let me know down below, I will get to it as soon as I can.
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