Walmart And Patti LaBelle Hope To Continue Dessert Magic With Two New Cakes

This holiday season, Walmart tried something new to move more baked goods: they created a celebrity-branded pie. The retailer, which moves a lot of groceries, teamed up with famed singer Patti Labelle to mass-produce pies loosely based on her own recipe. That product was extremely successful, and now two new products are hitting Walmart’s store shelves: a pound cake and a caramel cake.

Buzzfeed shared this exciting news, and we learned something interesting about the original sweet potato pie frenzy: the singer and the mega-retailer had been working on the baked-goods project since March. The sweet potato pie was meant to be a limited-time offering before Thanksgiving, not a permanent bakery offering.

As celebrity pie fever swept the nation and stores in many areas sold out, Walmart apparently realized that they had a hit, producing more pies in December and making their presence on the pie shelf permanent.

You may not associate the singer of “Lady Marmalade” with a lifestyle brand, but Patti LaBelle is a cookbook author, her own line of sauces sold on her website, and until recently had her own line of sheets, comforters, and throw pillows. (No marmalade, though.) The Walmart baked goods are all sold under her “Patti’s Good Life” brand.

“We haven’t had so much excitement since we relaunched Twinkies,” the retailer’s VP for bakery and deli told Buzzfeed. Yes, customers were thrilled with the pies, but it’s unlikely that there will be a similar frenzy over the cakes.

The pound cake with vanilla icing will cost $6.44, and the caramel cake will retail for $13.94. They both go on sale two weeks from today, on January 18.

Patti LaBelle Launches Two New Cakes At Walmart, “Patti Cakes” [Buzzfeed]

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist