The Cardboard Cake is a bespoke product designed to bust the myth that gluten-free food tastes like cardboard. The process of translating the idea into a product on bakery shelves involved 3 key design processes: 1. The engineering of a bespoke metal baking tray to make pastry look like corrugated cardboard. 2. The design of the cake itself - balancing taste profile and texture to make the cake look like cardboard but taste great. 3. The design of the Cardboard cake packaging.

Yes, the Cardboard Cake is available from Wholegreen Bakery’s stores.

https://wholegreenbakery.com.au/cardboardcake

When it comes to food, for the most part, Australians are a pretty “no-nonsense” down to earth bunch. The meat pie is an iconic national favourite, as is the sausage roll and the vegimite sandwich. And one thing these downunder delicacies all traditionally have in common is gluten; so you can imagine the reaction you get from your average Aussie if you mention the words “gluten-free”. That’s right, it’s not positive! And there just aren’t enough good-tasting gluten-free food options available on mainstream Australian supermarket shelves to convince the general public that a gluten-free meat pie, sausage roll or vegimite sandwich can actually taste pretty good. As far as most Aussies are concerned, the very idea of gluten-free is verging on being un-Australian. Their mind is made up: “Gluten-free food? Tastes like cardboard mate!”.

For a long time there’s been a perception in Australia that “gluten-free food tastes like cardboard”, which is bad news when you’re one of a growing number of Australians diagnosed with Coeliac Disease. It’s also bad news when you’re Wholegreen Bakery - a company that specialises in making gluten-free baked goods. Our brief was to shift the “bland taste” perception of gluten-free food and help drive sales for Wholegreen. We didn’t have much of a production budget - less than AUD $10K, and no media budget whatsoever. What we did have however was access to a talented gluten-free pastry chef; so what did we do? We designed a new kind of cake.

Publically bust the “Tastes like Cardboard” myth by creating and launching a cake that looks like cardboard but tastes delicious.

We started by creating a CAD drawing that we rendered as a cardboard mockup made from layers of corrugated cardboard. Then we commissioned a steel fabricator to create a bespoke baking tray that enabled us to make sheets of pastry that resembled our mockup. We then worked closely with Wholegreen Bakery’s head pastry chef through an iterative process to balance appealing taste profile and texture with cardboard appearance. We launched during Australia’s Coeliac Awareness Week by sending a slice of Cardboard Cake to 100+ celebrity chefs and foody influencers. The cake was delivered in a specially designed cardboard box that promised to make “gluten-free food sceptics eat their words” and told the story of the Cardboard Cake.

The Cardboard Cake made gluten-free food sceptics quite literally eat their words and left Australians in no doubt that you can be restricted to a gluten-free diet and still eat food that you enjoy. With a production budget of just AUD $8400 and a media budget of AUD $0, The Cardboard Cake drove close to AUD $2 Million of earned media. Social media sentiment was 100% positive. The day after launch, Wholegreen Bakery’s flagship store sold out - not just of cardboard cake, but of everything. And, at the time of writing (3 weeks after launch), sales are up 24% across all 3 stores. Consequently, the Cardboard Cake has so far delivered an ROI of 238%.