Ever wonder how consumers feel about your franchise? Franchise Times editorial staffers check out three brands in a different genre each month, and report back in FT Undercover.
A white chocolate raspberry mini bundt cake from Nothing Bundt Cakes (A) could cure any ailment or bad mood. Dramatic, perhaps, but the sentiment is there: These cakes are the real deal. Dare I say, Nothing Bundt Cakes is what Crumbl thinks it is. You could easily visit once a week, and you don’t have to commit to four giant, overly sweet treats. Nothing Bundt Cakes’ flavors—think Snickers, confetti cake and carrot—are vast, with new ones popping up each season. (I tried the limited-time fall flavors, pumpkin spice and caramel apple cider, which were heavenly bites of autumn.) A dozen cupcake-sized bundtinis run $29 and customers get to pick out the flavors. A 10-inch cake, which serves 18, costs $40. It costs more than your standard grocery store cake, but is so much tastier. Other customers must share my delight, because systemwide sales were up 15.5 percent in 2024, to $856 million. With 660 stores, that’s an average of $1.3 million with a typical bakery size of 2,047 square feet. That’s not too shabby for a store that really sells only one thing.
The upshot: Let them eat cake! But by “them,” I mean me, and by “cake,” I mean all the bundtinis my local Nothing Bundt Cakes has in stock. —E.W.
Great Harvest Bread Co. (B) is serious about wheat. The company sources its wheat kernels from the northern plains of Montana, and the wheat flour is stone-milled daily in stores, yielding a higher quality flour without artificial dough conditioners. The resulting taste is pure bread heaven. While some Great Harvest stores lean into a cafe format, this location in St. Paul, Minnesota, was production bakery all the way, with some retail shelves and cases for its loaves and various baked goods. No frills, no problem. Foot traffic was light midway through a Sunday morning, with plenty of fresh, carb-heavy delights to peruse. Great Harvest has about 160 locations, and each franchisee can create their own menu. The raspberry cream cheese scone and marionberry scruffin—a scone-muffin mashup—were immediate winners, chewy and laced with fruit. They were a steal at $3.50 apiece. The pandan sweet bread ($8.75), an Asian milk bread made with the paste from pandan leaves, was a fun one-off choice. Pillowy soft yet chewy, it had hints of almond and a slight floral flavor. We’ll be back to stock up on sourdough.
The upshot: Great Harvest rises above (pun intended) other brands as a true production bakery where wheat is the star. —L.M.
Banana is the most underrated dessert flavor. When paired with pudding, cake and cookies—hey, that’s all the better. At Magnolia Bakery (C), banana pudding is its signature treat. Each season, it offers another fun flavor (in September, it was pumpkin spice). But I like to stick to the classics, so I got a medium-sized order of banana pudding for $7.25; it was the perfect size to share with my dessert partner. It was well-worth the cost and, frankly, I was surprised it was only $7.25 at this tourist-heavy spot in downtown Chicago. On a 90-plus-degree day, I was grateful to sit inside an air-conditioned bakery while watching the employees scoop a seemingly endless amount of banana pudding into cups. Magnolia earned its icon status in part due to an appearance on “Sex and the City,” in which characters Charlotte and Carrie eat a cupcake in front of its West Village store in New York City. Other NYC-based television shows have since referenced the brand too. It started franchising internationally 15 years ago, but launched its U.S. franchise program this year. “No-bake” locations can be as small as 600 square feet but bakeries require about 2,000 square feet.
The upshot: Magnolia’s banana pudding lives up to the hype. —E.W.