Carlo’s City Hall Bake Shop is a family-owned bakery located in Hoboken, New Jersey that has been in business for more than 100 years. Employees pride themselves on offering the highest quality wedding cakes, specialty cakes and baked goods, created using modern, innovative cooking techniques. Carlo’s has received national recognition thanks to the Valastro family’s dedication to quality and customer service. 

Bartolo Valastro Jr. “Buddy”, the company’s master baker, has been featured in numerous publications, including Modern Bride and The Knot. Additionally, Today Show viewers voted one of Buddy’s cake designs as the best cake in America.  Buddy has also made multiple appearances on the Food Network to showcase his intricate sugar art designs, specialty cakes and wedding cakes.

Carlo’s attributes its success to their employee’s commitment to the quality of their products, and to exceptional customer service – the Valastro’s believe that every customer should be treated like they are part of the family.

To keep up with demand and reach more customers, Carlo’s continues to grow its retail operations with store openings in Times Square and Ridgewood, New Jersey.

To support the company’s tremendous growth, Carlo’s recently opened a 55,000 square foot facility called the Cake Factory at Lackawanna Center in Jersey City, approximately one mile from its flagship retail store in Hoboken. This state-of-the-art building houses all of the company’s major baking and cake decorating operations, as well as its business offices and call center.

When architecting its Cake Factory, Carlo’s wanted to build the most innovative facility for baking, and knew that technology would play a critical role. Because the Factory also houses its call center, reliable voice service was critical.  High-speed Internet was also important to help ensure that all communications between the Factory and store locations were delivered in a timely fashion, and to support e-commerce initiatives and future bandwidth intensive applications, like videoconferencing.  The company was also looking for reliable, high-speed Internet service to support its growing use of cloud-based business applications.  Carlo’s turned to Comcast Business to help bring its IT vision to life.

“For a bakery, we are doing some interesting things with technology which makes my job extremely fun. However, at the end of the day it is about the customer. With Comcast we know we have the confidence that we can grow our business while still offering the quality and consistency of a neighborhood bakery.”

– Leo Minervini

Chief Information Officer at Carlo’s Bakery

When evaluating vendors, Carlo’s looked at credibility, uptime, support, SLAs and cost and Comcast came through on all fronts. Comcast offered the service and response times that Carlo’s needs to deliver the superior customer experience for which they are known.

Carlo’s selected a 50 Mbps Comcast Business Ethernet Dedicated Internet connection, Comcast Business PRI Trunk Lines that interface with their existing PBX system, and a Comcast Business Ethernet Private Line for a secure connection between its new Lackawanna facility and its Hoboken store for all voice and data communications, including interoffice VoIP dialing.

The 50 Mbps Internet connection will provide the high capacity and reliable connectivity required as Carlo’s moves more of its day-to-day business operations into the cloud. Using the Force.com platform-as-a-service, the company has created “Cakeforce” a cloud-based cake ordering system and customer database that will eventually include a product database and a variety of other applications so that employees can access the data regardless of their location.

According to Minervini, “Over time, we plan to move our accounting, finance and accounts payable applications to the cloud as well. With most of our business-critical information being online, ensuring that we have the best possible data connectivity is paramount.”

Additionally, with the fast and reliable Internet connection they are getting from Comcast Business, Carlo’s has been able to expand their e-commerce offers, including a “grab and go” service where customers can order from the company website and pick up their baked goods in-store and they are piloting the ability to deliver online orders nationwide.

“Comcast has helped us better service our customers, thanks to their reliability. We have found that our Comcast connection at Lackawanna is our lifeline, even more so as we move into the cloud,” said Minervini.