“It’s time to give back,” said Pinky Yee, Goldilocks marketing director. “We take pride that Goldilocks is a homegrown Filipino brand, and for our company to last this long (47 years), we felt it’s about time we opened our doors to our patrons.”
Yee is talking about The Goldilocks Cake City. On Shaw Boulevard in Mandaluyong City, it’s an educational-cum-fantasy land for children who wish to know how cakes are made, decked and embellished, in a huge Willy Wonka-inspired cake factory.
The Mandaluyong cake plant services about a hundred Goldilocks stores in Metro Manila, with production operating 24/7. It has other facilities in Pangasinan servicing the central and northern part of Luzon, while its Cabuyao, Laguna, factory handles the Calabarzon and Bicol region.
For Visayas, Goldilocks has plants in Iloilo and Cebu. For Mindanao, two commissaries are in Davao and Cagayan de Oro.
“Education is one of our advocacies,” said Yee. “I’ve seen how my children would do their school field trips. Ours is a total educational experience. We show kids how it feels like to be in a real production setting. It’s like home economics, though it’s slowly diminishing with the advent of technology and Internet.”
The plant was an old cake factory, but renovated only five years ago to accommodate the cake tour concept. Liberal use of rainbow colors, spacious walkways, high walls and floor-to-ceiling glass windows complete the dream world.
Quick tour
A select group of media had the privilege to experience the Cake City, with Goldilocks celebrity couple endorsers Ryan and Judy Ann Santos-Agoncillo.
Wearing lab gowns and hairnets, the couple led the group to the building, which was fragrant with the sweet aroma of freshly baked goodies. The journey began in the Egg Room, where over 200,000 fresh eggs from different suppliers are cracked open (both done manually and by machine) every day—or about 5,400,000 eggs a year.
“That’s more than enough to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool!” said Ryan.
Approximately 10,000 kg of sugar are used every day. For this plant, Goldilocks roughly makes 8,000 premium cakes a day and about 4,400,000 cake rolls a year.
“If you line up the rolls produced in this plant,” added Ryan, “you can actually form a line from Tawi-Tawi to Taiwan.”
The Filling Room houses Goldilocks’ creamy, finger-licking cake fillings.
“We make our own whipped cream and butter, and we call them ‘G (Goldilocks) Cream’ and ‘G Butter,’” noted Yee. “We blend them with regular flavors to create that distinct Goldilocks taste.”
cake, Goldilocks Chocolate Peanut Butter Banana Supreme.
The Dairy Room is where all kinds of frostings or icings are prepared. One could see the staff applying final touches to the cakes after manually icing and rolling them, and lining them up on a computerized conveyor.
“We bake the cakes on the third floor,” said Yee. “Then the cakes are ‘conveyored’ down to the second floor where the staff fill them up with icing and roll them.”
Goldilocks’ famous theme cakes are all done in the Cake Decorating Room. There the cakes are transformed into colorful celebration cakes.
Goldilocks has the exclusive rights to popular brands such as Disney, Warner Brothers, Marvel Studios, Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon.
Party place
The Cake City tour is free of charge. After the walk-through, guests can proceed to the Cake City event venue where kids can decorate their own cake for a minimal fee.
The venue is also a party place where children can celebrate their birthdays or any special occasion. It can accommodate at least 50 kids with enough space for games and decorations. It is decked like a cake land complete with bakery corner, police cake patrol, cake academy, cake city school bus.
“We’ve received positive feedback for the Cake City,” said Yee. “We accept tours three days a week. Soon, five days a week.”
Right outside the party area is a mini-museum of Goldilocks memorabilia. Kids will be thrilled to see the first two mixers used by the founders in 1966; the first adding machines; first advertisement of Goldilocks in 1986 after 20 years in the business; first wedding cake created by the founders; and some old pictures of the first batch of Goldilocks employees.
Limited-edition cake
To usher in the holiday season, Goldilocks also collaborated with Judy Ann to create a Goldilocks Limited-Edition Cake: the Goldilocks Chocolate PB (Peanut Butter) Banana Supreme.
Judy Ann designed the cake.
are made, decked and embellished at The Cake City.
“I love bananas and I love chocolates,” said Judy Ann. “When I was pregnant I would always crave for banana and eat it with Nutella or butter. So, when Goldilocks offered me to design my own cake and showed me the ingredients I could play with, it was a dream come true.”
The cake has two layers of banana butter cake, flavored with banana syrup and filled with vanilla, peanut butter and cashew pralines. It’s topped with whipped cream, drizzled with chocolate syrup and encased in milk and white chocolate wedges.
Goldilocks Chocolate PB Banana Supreme is now available in all Goldilocks stores.
For Cake City Tour booking, visit www.goldilocks.com.ph