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Tarts & Truffles
Catering to an online audience
In a city abounding in great food, Tarts & Truffles stands out as the place to go when "great" isn't quite good enough. This quaint, European-style bakery, nestled in Sacramento's quiet Carmichael neighborhood, is famous for stirring up inventive cakes, pastries and top-notch treats for occasions when only the best will do. If you want your dessert to be special-something you won't find anywhere else-you definitely want to call Tarts & Truffles.
How the bakery earned its stellar reputation is simple. Every product it turns out is fabulous. But its delicious delicacies are just part of the secret behind its success. Owners Bruce and Judy Parks believe in taking innovation beyond creating unique products. Combining their complementary talents (she's a pastry chef; he's a business visionary), the couple is constantly looking for different ways to fine-tune their business concept so it works better for customers.
They've had to. Tarts & Truffles opened in 1981 in a growing shopping center, where it quickly earned a following for its astonishing signature cakes and desserts. Adapting to the daily flow of people going by, it made sense for the bakery to add food to its offering, and in a few years the shop evolved into a nice little bakery café. Eventually, though, the busy location proved to be too much of a good thing. The shopping center got so crowded, and the parking lot so packed, that retail customers couldn't get in and out of the bakery easily to pick up their orders. "Between the traffic and the fact that we needed more room for production, our location didn't work for us anymore," Bruce Parks said. They again adapted, moving the business to a freestanding building a few miles away.
A new location created a new set of challenges. "We didn't have thousands of people walking by, so we had to come up with new ways to draw people in-or take our product to them," Parks said. So he embraced cyber technology, using the Web to offer convenient, online ordering of Tarts & Truffles' signature specialty cakes.
Customers can log on to the bakery's Web site at www.tartsandtruffles.com to get pictures and descriptions of its broad line of decadently drizzled, artfully garnished cakes. Simply select the item you want, click a button, and your order will automatically fax to the bakery. Cakes are for pickup only, so Tarts & Truffles doesn't shoulder profit-eating delivery costs. But the Internet draws new customers by making it easy for people to place orders without visiting the bakery.
One of the most popular items Tarts & Truffles sells on its Web site is Chocolate Euphoria, a signature dark chocolate cake made with Progressive Baker® All-Purpose Flour and glazed with Belgian chocolate. Another is Citron, a lemon torte made with Progressive Baker® Cake Flour and fresh lemon curd, decorated with fresh flowers.
The bakery has also used the Web to launch new profit centers-among them a sandwich delivery program and a popular take-and-bake pizza line. Though outside the norm of your typical retail bakery, such concepts are a natural fit for Tarts & Truffles. They've enabled for the bakery, now situated in a less populated setting, to rebuild the foodservice business it enjoyed at its original location.
The sandwich delivery program targets local businesses, delivering boxed lunches to companies that order sandwiches and salads in advance. Customers log on to the site at www.boxlunchesatwork.com to order at least five items from a list of more than a dozen lunch entrees. Orders automatically fax to the bakery, where they are filled and delivered the next day. The sandwiches are fresh and flavorful, made with upscale ingredients on scratch breads like Foccaccia, made from Progressive Baker® Bread Flour. Each lunch costs $8.95, including bottled water, fruit, and a Tarts & Truffles cookie.
Take-and-bake pizza is another new concept Parks has initiated, an idea that came to him after reading a survey showing that 10 of the top 50 fastest growing foodservice chains were pizza concepts. Since pizza actually originated out of neighborhood bakeries, Parks thought he could leverage the Internet to tap pizza trends in his bakery setting. "We didn't want to bake the pizza, because we needed the oven capacity for pastry production," he said. "But we had the mixers and the dough and the skill to make a great crust. We thought we could combine it with other ingredients on the foodservice side to make a better quality take-and-bake pizza than what was out there."
Parks decided if they were going to do it, they would make their pizza as good as it could possibly be. Each pizza is custom made to order, featuring unique upscale ingredients, and hand-tossed crusts made from Progressive Baker® Strong Patent Flour. Like the cakes, pizzas are for pickup only, and can be ordered online at www.takeandbakepizza.com.
For customers who can't remember Tarts & Truffles' burgeoning list of domain names, the bakery's Web site links to all its various product lines. And more online innovations are sure to come, because Tarts & Truffles has discovered there's more than one way for progressive scratch bakers to innovate business to fit today's marketplace!