KANSAS CITY, MO — While the winter season inspires bakeries to find new ways to draw customers in, there is one such celebration shortly after the hustle and bustle of the holidays that invites a splurge of sweets and higher calorie offerings before a season of fasting: Mardi Gras.
The most famous place to celebrate Mardi Gras is New Orleans, but bakeries around the country find ways to bring the festivities to their own communities by offering traditional desserts associated with the holiday, such as King Cakes.
Planning ahead
Because it falls on March 4, 2025, Mardi Gras may seem a ways off, but bakers are already preparing so they can stock their cases full of festive treats.
For Three Brothers Bakery, based in Houston, TX, Mardi Gras was a holiday the owners, Bobby and Janice Jucker, wanted to get right despite their geographical location. To ensure their bakery’s King Cake was authentic — and tasty — the pair went on a sponsored trip to Louisiana during a Mardi Gras season to spark some ideas on generating sales during a traditionally slower time.
The RPIA Group sponsored the trip which allowed Janice and Bobby to tour local bakeries and try different King Cakes.
“After we came home with all the King Cakes, we pulled out large tables, laid each cake out, and picked what we liked the best from each one,” Janice said. “From there, we formulated ours to tweak what we needed and perfect our own recipe.”
The duo found immediate success with their version, enough to turn the one-day holiday into an entire range of menu items.
“Now, we are all in with Mardi Gras King Cakes and other decorated products,” Bobby said. “We learned it was an entire season of revenue for our bakery.”
Three Brothers Bakery’s Mardi Gras menu also includes royal iced gingerbread men, cupcakes, iced cookies, petit fours, cheesecake, and three types of King Cake: fruit, plain, and cream cheese.
Partnering up
Brian Pansari, owner of La Bon Bake Shoppes, which has four retail locations in New Jersey, also wanted to bring King Cakes to his part of the US.
As part of his involvement with the RPIA Group, he toured bakeries and networked with the other bakers. In 2014, he crossed paths with Sherri Paul Thigpen, owner of Paul’s Pastry Shop in Picayune, MS.
As conversation flowed between the two retail bakers, Brian learned how stressful the Mardi Gras holiday was for Paul’s Pastry Shop. Known as the “Home of the Original Cream Cheese- and Fruit-Filled King Cake,” nationwide shipping for the special dessert was taking a toll on the bakery.
“It was getting to the point where shipping was overwhelming,” Brian said. “And they would want to ship the cakes quickly — you don’t want it to have to take two or three days — and the cost to ship it from Mississippi to the northeast or to the West Coast was getting prohibitive.”
The dilemma sparked the idea of partnership. The plan was simple but extremely effective: For orders being shipped to Virginia through Maine, La Bon bakery would make the King Cakes and ship them from New Jersey. The cakes would ship faster and at a lower cost.
The head production team at Paul’s Pastry Shop traveled to New Jersey and trained La Bon’s bakers on the custom King Cakes, sharing the specialized formulas with Brian’s team. The King Cakes ordered through Paul’s Pastry Shop’s website were made and shipped from La Bon. The partnership was so successful that, eventually, Brian started selling King Cakes in his flagship location, turning a profit for his own bakery.
“We had people who had moved from the south, or had relatives that were from the New Orleans area, who said, ‘Wow, I can get an authentic King Cake here now.’ From there, word spread to where we had people from outside the state — an hour or two away — making trips just for this cake.”
Today, the bakery makes King Cakes year-round, but the limited-time Mardi Gras menu includes paczkis, cupcakes and macarons, all in traditional and gourmet flavors.
A new direction
For Three Brothers Bakery in their corner of the US to La Bon Bake Shoppes, Mardi Gras has proven to be a profitable holiday, so it should follow that a New Orleans bakery would fare well, given the heart of the merriment is located precisely there. But for James Vitrano, CEO of Sucre, it was challenging to satisfy King Cake aficionados.
“As a New Orleanian, other than the Saints not doing well and Hurricane Katrina, the third pain in my life associated with the city is the disfavor that I may fall into with King Cake people,” James said. “My hat goes off to those legendary bakeries that have a hold on a certain way of baking it.”
However risky, James wanted to take his King Cake a different way, based on Sucre’s history, with the goal of melding the bakery’s aesthetic with an upscale twist. The initial approach included a partnership with the Krewe of Iris, a traditional ball and parading women’s carnival organization, and Mignon Faget, a luxury jewelry store.
The partnership promoted a giveaway that featured a Sucre’s King Cake filled with either a Mignon Faget carnival pendant or a purple parade throw from Krewe of Iris, as opposed to the traditional plastic baby.
“We wanted to inject a little bit of excitement and flair into the King Cake,” James said.
On top of adding a little token outside of the norm, one of the biggest drivers to alter the King Cake was how it arrived on customer doorsteps nationwide.
“We’re one of the only bakeries that sends the King Cake fully decorated,” James explained. “Our cake is beautiful, but it’s always been a struggle to get it to the guest — who’s not here — looking the same way it looks as if you were to buy it in-store.”
Sucre completed countless tests and shifted traditional elements to ensure the final product made it to the customer looking picture perfect. One of those changes included using glitter to color the cake instead of a sprayed-on luster look.
“We wanted to ship nationwide, so we had to sacrifice a little bit of the past to ensure that the future [King Cakes] can be experienced by more people throughout the country,” said Michelle Kuehne, director of internal operations and procurement at Sucre. “No disregard to the past, and it broke our heart to change it, but there are a variety of business reasons to put our own touch on it.”
While James set out to do the industry and the King Cake world justice, it’s been a moving target for his audience, but one element that won’t change is the attention to detail. Sucre is dedicated to baking each and every King Cake with love and respect for tradition.
Embracing the customs of Mardi Gras and incorporating the thematic elements into bakery cases will not only draw in die-hard fans but also introduce a new wave of holiday treats to the uninitiated … and that’s a win for any retail baker.
