Cracking cake safety

WORLDWIDE APPEAL: Juli Chapin and her husband, Scott, own and operate CakeSafe LLC, which makes a device that safely encases and moves wedding cakes. The devices, known as CakeSafes, are sold all over the world. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO
WORLDWIDE APPEAL: Juli Chapin and her husband, Scott, own and operate CakeSafe LLC, which makes a device that safely encases and moves wedding cakes. The devices, known as CakeSafes, are sold all over the world. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO

For the bakery that specializes in multitiered wedding cakes, no disaster is worse than the dropped cake, followed closely by the crushed box and the smeared icing.

A South Kingstown couple has created a small business that blossomed around sales of a seemingly simple box intended to quell those fears.

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CakeSafe LLC ensures that elaborate cakes of all sizes arrive at their destination as intended, with nothing crushed or smeared.

Juli Chapin, who started the business with her husband, Scott, was originally a wedding cake baker. She understood the need for secure cake transportation as much as anyone.

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Although wedding cakes are supported by a structure of cardboard discs underneath each layer, and interior dowels to support the tiers, none of that holds up if the cake slides or tips in the van on the way to the venue.

“Imagine putting your brakes on with something that’s 20 inches high and it’s fragile,” Juli Chapin said.

One day she asked Scott, then working as a biomedical engineer, to deliver a cake to the Quidnessett Country Club in North Kingstown. He put the cake in the back of their vehicle, and saw a problem.

“Just driving out of the driveway, I’m watching it in the rearview mirror, and I’m saying to myself, ‘This is [just] nuts.’ ”

On the ride to the wedding venue, the engineer thought about ways to solve the safety issue.

“I made the first box right after that,” he said.

Now a patented design, the CakeSafe secures cakes by fastening the traditional system of dowels and cardboard disks to a sturdy, reusable plastic box.

“If you assemble a cake, it doesn’t matter how big it is, if you drive a rod through the cake boards themselves, and if you support that rod on the top and the bottom so the rod can’t move, then the cake boards can’t move.”

Sold in nine different sizes, to fit cakes from 12 inches to 28 inches in height (a seven-tier cake), the CakeSafe is now a full-time business for the Chapins.

Beyond that device, they also sell acrylic discs, a frosting tool that helps people ice layers evenly.

And a more recent product has extended their reach beyond cake-makers. The air-brush spray booth allows people who use decorative spray devices to contain airborne food coloring or sugar particles within a small area.

Customers for that include a supermarket chain, which uses it in supermarket kitchens to apply oil-based glazes on finished breads.

Since CakeSafe launched eight years ago, sales have jumped annually. The Chapins now employ five people. Although they do not release sales figures, the couple said in a recent interview that gross sales have increased an average of 41 percent annually since 2009.

The price for the safe ranges from $199 to $495. That’s not cheap, but it’s priceless if the idea is to deliver a wedding cake worth several thousand dollars.

“If it saves one cake, it pays for itself,” Scott Chapin said. •

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