Creative Occasions provides the in-store bakery market with quality, customized cakes. The company ensures its cakes are perched atop the quality chain by using upscale ingredients in its cake formulas.

The key to producing high-quality cakes is formulating with real butter, using real fruit or mousse fillings in every cake and creating a high-ratio cake (120% sugar to flour).

The combination of these three things creates an eating experience that is different from two layers of cake and some icing on it.

However, this intense focus on quality creates obstacles. When commodity prices skyrocketed in 2008, Creative Occasions, and bakeries throughout the country, paid exorbitant prices for ingredients such as eggs, oils, packaging and butter. Despite these cost pressures, COI stressed that the company would never use less expensive ingredients to reduce its costs.

We've had customers ask COI if we could make our cakes a little cheaper. We tell them that we will make the cakes smaller for them, but we will not sway by adding lesser ingredients.