An Evening With Buddy Valastro, The Real-Life Willy Wonka

From outside, the enormous building at 629 Grove Street in Jersey City looks like any old warehouse. Surrounded by loading docks and with few windows, it barely stands out among its industrial neighbors. Yet when you walk through its doors and the sweet smell of baking cakes fills you up until you can almost taste the buttercream frosting, you suddenly realize exactly where you are.

Carlo’s Bakery at Lackawanna isn’t just an ordinary factory—it’s Willy Wonka’s Factory, except the man behind it all isn’t a cartoonish, wacky genius. Instead, he’s Buddy Valastro, a fourth-generation baker and small business owner who earned his stripes working alongside his father, Buddy Sr., in Carlo’s Bakery in Hoboken, NJ. Now a nationally recognized celebrity chef thanks to the popularity of his TLC show Cake Boss, Valastro isn’t wacky or cartoonish like Wonka. But with seven Carlo’s Bakery locations between New Jersey and New York, a 55,000-square-foot factory, and a line of cookware at major retailers such as Kohl’s, he is a small business genius.

As I walked down the hall of the Lackawanna factory, I wasn’t sure what to expect. That night, Valastro was recording a holiday baking how-to video that would be streamed live on his company Web site and Facebook, and demonstrating some of the products in his cookware collection. The cakelette pans, frosting bags, and other tools he would be using would be made available for purchase right within the video through a click-to-buy link, and customers would be treated to a 30 percent discount for tuning in. The entire production was an experiment in live social selling, and I prepared myself for an hour-long infomercial with a neat social media tie-in. What followed, however, was anything but.

On set, Valastro is comfortable. He jokes around with the production crew before filming starts, and looks over the prepped ingredients on his cooking counter. The apricot jam is too thick, he decides, and walks over to a nearby sink to dilute it a little. A quick mix with his brush, and it’s good.

When the broadcast starts rolling, he’s a little stiff, but a few seconds in, he starts explaining why he decided to do a live show, and just like that, he’s completely on. “I want people at home to have the tools, the ingredients, and the know-how to bake. I’ve been doing this since I was fifteen years old, and I know that when you put your heart into your cake and you step back and look at it, you get a feeling of self-worth. I want to share that with you,” he says.

First up are the ghost cakelettes, small ghost-shaped cakes baked in a pan sold exclusively at Kohl’s. As Valastro decorates the cakes and fusses with frosting alongside daughter Sofia, 11, the moment of truth arrives. “If you click on the product tab below, you can buy this item right now from Kohl’s,” he says. Everyone in the room turns their head to the live feed. Sure enough, up pops a click-to-buy link, and Valastro gets a big thumbs-up from Josh Cox, director of marketing at BrandLive, the live-selling platform that’s supporting the broadcast.

The two-tier cakelettes are next, perfect for “blowing your guests away” when they come over for Thanksgiving or Christmas. “They’re gonna die when they see this,” Buddy jokes as he rolls out white fondant with a plastic rolling pin from his line and covers a chocolate cake with it in one quick motion. “You might be wondering why I use plastic. Well, if you use metal, I think it’ll get too cold and might dry out the fondant. You can use wood, but over time, it’ll probably get little dings on it and might mess up the fondant,” he explains. The rolling pin was not one of the featured products that night, but he wanted his fans to know why he’s behind every product he sells, he told me later.

One by one, the desserts are made, and the links for the night’s five featured products pop up throughout the broadcast without a hitch. At the end, it’s time for questions from the viewers. At first, Valastro reads a few questions off a teleprompter—they were submitted before the show and chosen by his team. “Why does my pumpkin pie always separate from the crust?” one viewer asks. Valastro pauses, thinking. “You might be baking it too long,” he says. “Try lowering the temperature to keep it from drying out, and take it out a little sooner to keep it from separating,” he recommends.

A few presubmitted questions later, he picks up an iPad for some live questions. “I’m intrigued by the way Buddy holds the frosting bag. I thought you had to push it all the way down to the…” he reads, and stops. Valastro can’t scroll down to see the rest of the question, or maybe it just got cut off in the post. He fumbles with the iPad and jokes, “I’m trying, but it’s live!” He hasn’t seen these questions in advance, but is ready on the spot. “It’s about grabbing what you can hold,” he starts explaining, and breezes through the rest of the live questions. It’s real, relatable, and the fans eat it up, so to speak.

After the broadcast, he looks relieved. “What made you want to do a live-selling event like this?” I ask him, and after an hour of watching him turn boxed cake mix into a dessert that looks like it belongs on the cover of Martha Stewart Living, his answer doesn’t surprise me.

“I want to show people how behind the product I am. People think that if you’re gonna have a brand, you just get a product, stamp your name on it, and sayonara. But look at this stuff. Every single cake batter mix has a pudding pouch inside it. So if we open this guy up here,” he says, tearing into a package of baking mix, “this little custard pouch was part of the formulation. Other cake mix doesn’t come with that,” he says.

Then Valastro gets to the heart of the brand. “All this stuff is especially designed because of things that we love and things that we hate and things that we wish were different. This brand was my opportunity to get things exactly the way I want, and that’s very rare. I want fans to know how behind it I am and how much a part of this I am. The truth of the matter is, I want to see people making these at home and putting them on Facebook and tweeting [them]. When it’s live, you’re right there with them, showing them how things work and why they work, and you’re giving them a chance to buy it in that moment and bring it into their own homes. It’s like they’re right here because I am just who I am. I’m the same guy off camera.”

And it’s true, he really is.

He’s standing in a crowd of PR folks and his production crew when he suddenly turns and asks, “Hey, want a tour?” Of course I do, and we’re off. A strict sign on the door says no one without a hair net is allowed, but we march through anyway, Valastro greeting bakers on the floor by name and me running to keep up. There’s the batter dispensing machine, the ovens, the biscotti maker, the jugs of custard…. “Take a cupcake,” he says as he pulls a tray of warm treats from a stack. “We’re a from-scratch bakery. That hasn’t changed. You can taste the custard, right?” he asks. I can, and it suddenly makes me regret ever waiting in line at Georgetown Bakery, Magnolia, or Crumbs.

Throughout the factory, there are family photos everywhere: in an office right in the center of the oven room, in the classrooms that Carlo’s uses for cooking classes, in the meeting rooms, and everywhere in between. The business is much bigger than it was when he started out, but sua famiglia—his family—is still what drives him every day, he says.

And that’s why the interactive video platform is perfect for small businesses.

“Live interactive video enables brands and personalities to really tell a story,” BrandLive’s Cox explains. “In this day and age, it’s hard for businesses to differentiate themselves, but in terms of creating a unique consumer experience, it’s all about the story behind the brand. In Buddy’s case, his family is the story. So here, we get to see him with his daughter, watch him do his thing, and talk to fans in real time. It becomes less about just selling a product, and more about what it can do and the lifestyle around it,” he adds.

Even as small businesses become not quite so small, they can’t afford to lose the customer bonds that brought them to their success. For Valastro, shooting an episode of Cake Boss for millions of viewers or putting his line of cookware up for sale at Kohl’s or Amazon is one thing, but streaming a holiday special for devoted fans and Facebook followers who are happy to tune in at 8:00 p.m. on a Wednesday is another. “We’re giving them a discount if they buy the product while they’re tuned in because we’re grateful, and because I really do want them to see how useful these tools are,” he says.

As the night wraps up and I get ready to leave, I know I’ve got one more question to ask him: I’m curious to know if he has any advice for other small businesses that want to experiment with new digital channels such as interactive video or social media, but am reluctant. I wondered whether he still considers his cake empire a “small business,” but had to ask anyway.

“I love social media,” he responds. “I mean it’s people who love and adore what you do, and you can engage them and show them different things. I posted a picture last night of a cake that I loved, and it was seen by over five million people. How else can you say whatever you want to say to five million people other than social media? The more you embrace it, the better. But you have to be real about it. I was just walking by and thinking, ‘Oh, I love this cake,’ and people like that. The same goes for live [interactive] video. You have to be real about what you’re doing. Always.”

Associate Editor Maria Minsker can be reached at mminsker@infotoday.com.

AN EVENING WITH

Buddy Valastro,

THE REAL-LIFE

WILLY WONKA

AN EVENING WITH

Buddy Valastro,

THE REAL-LIFE

WILLY WONKA