My ex-wife used to work in the bakery section for Wegmans. They decorate the cookies there, but the dough is from scratch. One day she was really bored and just started making flowers on the cookies.
They all sold immediately, but she was still told to stop since it didn’t come from corporate. That may just be that particular Weg’s. They also weren’t allowed to give the day old bread to the local soup kitchens.
Thanks kiz for the behind the scene info. 
Some of the cakes in the bakery are really good. I like the pudding cakes. We usually get Strawberry or lemon. They may not be scratch made, but they are tasty.
One of the two supermarket chains in this area is Price Chopper, based in Schenectady. I believe they either bake off-site and then bring the goods in or they do as described above where the frozen stuff is shipped and then baked in-house. For instance, there are locations that boil and bake bagels on-site, but I don’t know how they are made.
I do know that it’s started a bit of a fight around here with local bakeries versus Albany county due to local laws on trans-fats. I think that chains like Price Chopper were somehow automatically exempt from the ban as their products are made in a different county.
Costco makes its own cakes/cookies and bread. You can see them making them. Sometimes the bread package is still warm.
Mmm.
They can afford the overhead Their proof-and-bake rolls, though – at least in the Costcos around my way – are frozen like mine. I carry some of them in my store.
I’ve run across similar in my travels. It depends on Corporate, really. For instance, at the chain where I started out, we weren’t allowed to get too fancy decorating custom cakes – no freehand drawing, no promising a particular shade of color, for example. Their reasoning? Anyone who knew how to decorate should be able to do a cake order. Not everybody could draw freehand. We could never promise that exact particular shade of color.
Another reason is production time. The larger chains – my current employer being one of them – all have to conform to a timetable. If that timetable says that you’re supposed to decorate X number of cookies in Y number of minutes, you’re going to do them as fast as you can. There’s no time for extra flourishes and whatnot. Like the restaurant business, the faster you accomplish X number of tasks, the more tasks you can do. The more tasks you can do, the less labor costs for the company.
As for the prohibition of donating…another Corporate thing. One chain where I worked didn’t allow it. Whatever we didn’t sell on the day-old rack was tossed into the dumpster. Other chains didn’t have day-old racks and donated everything.
Another behind the scenes view. I work for one of the large bakery companies that make the cakes and such for the chains. My plant makes mainly sheet cakes, muffins, and brownies. My plant alone averages about 1.1 million pounds of cake a week and we ship it to many of the chains mentioned. We bake them, freeze them, then ship them out and the chain decorates them. All the cakes aren’t the same though, we use the chain’s recipe from when they baked their own. I’m in Southern California and it’s funny to visit family in Pennsylvania and find that they bought one of my cakes at their local chain.
No way. They do this because this is what corporate wants. There’s not a spare minute in the bakery.
(I used to work in various bakeries at Ralphs (Kroger).)
I have a relative who works at a Hy-Vee bakery. Anything that needs to be sold “fresh” comes to them par-baked, and they finish it there, and other items that can keep for a few days are prepared and packaged off-site. That does include cakes, which are custom-decorated at the store.
p.s. You can probably only get zombie designs at Halloween.
Ralphs still does, but only a few items. Not cakes. Cookies in some cases, from of course dough, etc.
Our local chain and Stop&Shop bake their own goods, in a manner of speaking. They’re heating up or thawing out food prepped for that purpose. The cookies may be baked from frozen dough, same with bread, baked fresh but from prepared dough. Cakes and most everything else is in ready to eat form, possibly requiring thawing. Even the bakeries around here get a large amount of their product that way.
Welcome to the Dope, great first post!
This thread has been interesting to read, I worked in a chain grocery store deli-bakery for a decade, including a lot of summers and holidays spent coming in at two in the morning to do the baking. I enjoyed baking, but my favorite part was frying the doughnuts, because there is almost nothing in the world as sweetly tasty as a doughnut that’s just come out of the glazing and is still warm.
Unfortunately, the supermarket chain (a dozen or so stores, mostly in Iowa), went out of business a few years ago. When I worked there the only things we baked from frozen were pies. Everything else – bread, rolls, cookies, cakes, pastries, stollen and fruitcake at Xmas, doughnuts – was made from scratch. Of course, that was 40 years ago…
I suppose that explains why I can’t stand the bread or other baked goods from most grocery stores. I just assumed they were made from scratch but I feel better knowing that they’re frozen as it all makes sense to me now.
Being frozen isn’t only what makes them taste bad. I’ve worked in decent standalone bakeries that bake and freeze cake layers and pull them out when needed, and they still taste good. The difference is the crap that goes into the products that are sold in grocery stores. Lots of artificial flavorings, no butter, cheap shortening, etc. Look at the ingredients on a loaf of grocery store bread - even the French bread is full of things that don’t belong in French bread. And the frostings are barely edible even when fresh.
To illustrate: frozen homemade cookie dough usually comes out better than fresh-baked in side-by-side comparisons.
Schnuck’s, a local St. Louis chain, bakes at least some items in store. It may be from frozen or par baked product though as mentioned above.
If I get by there today I’ll ask.
One other thing that has likely changed: when I started in the bakery in the late 70s, they were still using big one-foot blocks of lard to make the cake icing. At some point that changed over to big blocks of vegetable shortening, which the cake decorators found a little more difficult to work with.
It sounds gross, but this article about using lard in baking gets it right:
Fresh lard is white, as luminous as fallen snow and as silky to the touch as lipstick. When it melts, it becomes as clear as water. You might expect it to give off a brawny, barnyard aroma, but it is virtually odorless.
That’s one reason why lard has long been a staple of homemade pie crust baking.
I’ve been really disappointed in store-baked cookies (HyVee if that matters). They taste OK, but the texture is as if they were steamed, not baked. There was no crispiness to the bottom, which is what I’d expect with a baked cookie. McDonald’s chocolate chip cookies are nicely baked; I assume they’re sent to the stores as frozen cubes and then baked in each store.
If you like McDonald’s cookie, be sure to try Arby’s Chocolate Chip Salted Caramel cookies-they are everything I want in a cookie (except free, dang!).