Fresh Eric's Cake Company - Page 2

Although Fresh Eric’s cakes cost a little more than your average Swiss roll, the couple are convinced that the public is prepared to pay for quality.

“We try to price it so we are competitive with high end distributors, so there is a good quality end of the market to compete with. We are a little but more expensive, but hopefully not enough to put people off.

“It’s a funny sector we’re in – on one end of the scale there’s the WI, people who bake their own cakes, right up to the big national distributors like Brake Bros.

“We end up competing with them and everything in-between. We compete with the big suppliers on quality and we compete with the on-man bands by being professional, consistent and reliable.”

The business is staffed by five employees, including Eric and Jeanette, with duties spilt between kitchen work and driving the goods.

“Most of them were people we knew of that were reliable,” Eric says. “We made the decision early on that we would do all the training ourselves, we didn’t want people with lots of bakery experience, because we wanted to make sure we stuck with our recipes.

“We have great recipes and they are not what people trained in this country are used to – it’s an American style of cake.”

Now with around 40 clients, including Fortnum and Mason, Fresh Eric’s Cakes has enjoyed 10 per cent growth a month, every month, in 2005, trebling in size in just a year.

Eric admits this growth has caused some headaches.

“Finding suitable premises was a big deal for us,” he says. “As well as size and cost, we had to think about the future as we are planning to grow organically to be a manufacturer, so we needed planning permission for industrial use, but we’re too small for all that, so we have to find somewhere small and still meet all the health and safety requirements a big business needs to live by.

“We are growing very fast, so we end up spending money on getting our premises up to scratch, knowing that in one or two years’ time, we will outgrow it and we’ll have to do it all again in a 1,000 sq ft unit.”

The business has also made an understandable impact on the couple’s home life, with 70-hour weeks not uncommon.

“We share the childcare between us, so it means we have to spend more on staffing, but that’s the trade-off we are prepared to make,” Eric insists. “That’s why we went into it in the first place. It’s hard work, you’re always juggling, but you can do it.

“I like the fact that the kids know what we do, when you work in an office, it’s hard to explain what you do!”

The Watkins are now looking for investors so that Fresh Eric’s Cakes can be taken onto an industrial scale. Eric feels that this shouldn’t jeopardise the quality of the cakes.

“Baking is very concise – if you do the recipe every time, you’ll get the same result,” he explains. “Where there’s some craft is in the mixer, but when it comes to packaging, slicing and measuring out ingredients, you can scale up and not anything in quality.

“We’d like to start supplying distributors regionally and build up a national network.
We’ve got some ideas about the way to package the cakes that no-ones else does.

“We see ourselves continuing to grow and develop a brand – when we started out, we said we wanted to be the Ben and Jerry’s of cakes.”

www.freshericscakes.co.uk