Besides quality, Creative Occasions recognized another niche in supermarket cake business that was under-served: customization. We saw a gap in the market, and we saw a niche for not only putting quality back in, but also being able to customize products to specific end users.

Creative Occasions differentiates its products with customized decorations. Creative Occasions is experiencing burgeoning growth and acceptance in the marketplace.

This growth results from the company's unique cakes. This does not always mean coming up with original, revolutionary new product ideas. Instead, the company takes existing ideas and raises the quality bar through ingredients. We look throughout the country for interesting products that are popular in a particular region. Then, we introduce that product to a broader market.

For example, the company launched the Wave Cake in response to a popular cake in the Michigan marketplace. The original "bumpy" cake contains "waves" of chocolate on its top, which gives the cake an upscale taste and appearance. The company brought this cake to its research and development lab and charged R&D with making the cake better.

We took the idea from the original cake and turned it into a moist chocolate cake with a real buttercream waves enrobed with chocolate truffle. We have expanded in the last couple of years, but we stuck to the original premise of taking the quality of retail bakery cakes to the in-store segment and our strong belief that quality sells.