With nearly 800 locations throughout the U.S. and Canada, Nothing Bundt Cakes has come a long way since two moms who shared a passion for cake founded the chain in Las Vegas with a focus on the in-bakery experience just under three decades ago.
A 2026 Food On Demand Outstanding Operator, the brand is continuing to rise at a staggering pace, more than doubling the number of bakeries since 2020, with off-premises customers driving growth in recent years.
Dolf Berle, the Nothing Bundt Cakes CEO who began his tenure as the company’s highest-ranking executive in July 2023, said tailoring the business to better serve customers beyond the bakeries has been a primary focus under his leadership.
As of March, Nothing Bundt Cakes boasts 787 locations across the U.S. and Canada.
“It was really only in 2023 that we started building the engine around off-premise (sales),” Berle said. “We started with third-party delivery, as one might expect — Uber Eats, DoorDash and GrubHub. Today, 13 percent of our sales are through delivery, and that’s a combination of third-party delivery and what we also call two-party delivery and one-party delivery.”
Today, Nothing Bundt Cakes’ off-prem ecosystem consists of first-, second- and third-party delivery, partnering with community organizations for fundraising efforts, and pop-up events at venues such as music festivals, malls and youth sports tournaments. Berle said the brand’s catering operation has been steadily gaining momentum since onboarding with ezCater in 2023, which provided a pathway into more significant corporate and business environment sales.
“We think of off-premise sales as going beyond delivery,” Berle said. “Delivery is the mainstay and is the largest and most powerful dimension of off-premise sales right now, but we’re making real inroads into other types of off-site sales and fundraising.”
Berle said the brand identified fundraising as a useful off-prem tool about two years ago after recognizing its bakeries were already organically conducting such partnerships with community organizations, like churches and schools, at the local level.
“From a fundraising standpoint, we really focused on having a landing spot in the web page that made it very easy for groups looking to fundraise to sign up with us to fill in the relevant information about themselves, their mission and the type of fulfillment that they wanted,” Berle said. … “Last year, we established the technology that allows the bakery owners much more easily to process the intake and the incoming demand for fundraising activities, and we were teaching our bakery owners how to fulfill fundraising orders in a much more efficient fashion.”
The largest boost to Nothing Bundt Cake’s off-prem ecosystem stemmed from 3PDs, according to Berle, with tech partners like Check Mate, Olo and Uber Direct helping streamline the process.
“From a dollars standpoint, the most substantial growth has been third-party delivery, and we would expect that to continue to grow as a percentage,” Berle said. “At the same time, we continue to polish our website and make it easy and attractive for guests to order in advance. Over 35 percent of orders today in our system are ordered in advance on the website, through delivery or on the app.”
Nothing Bundt Cakes partners with Thanx for its app and online loyalty program, and the brand is in the process of migrating customers from its traditional email database to those platforms. Those initiatives, along with information gathered through 3PD sales, provide valuable customer data that the company uses to better understand and serve its guests.
Nothing Bundt Cakes users customer data to to understand guest behavior and guide marketing efforts.
“We are very clear that the more consumer insights we can have down to the individual-consumer level will be very, very powerful in our business,” Berle said. “The most robust expression of that has to do with our loyalty program, where we go so far as to understand the normal demographic information around a guest, but we also really want to understand their need states.”
The initiative to further understand consumer characteristics and spending patterns includes learning about the events in their lives beyond typical holidays that warrant celebration.
Through its digital platforms, the brand asks about moments customers may deem cake-worthy, like days when adopted children or pets joined their families, anniversaries of overcoming serious medical conditions, and graduation dates. Then, digital messages are sent to guests ahead of those events to suggest baked goods as part of the festivities.
“If you understand segments of consumers, you also may find that your brand is under-serving some group based on the company’s sophistication in various digital channels,” Berle said. “We learned that we were under-serving younger guests, who were much more comfortable in the digital environment, that we were not really serving very well up until a couple of years ago.”
As the brand looks toward the future, Nothing Bundt Cakes may soon start delivering a night with the help of 3PD platforms, well beyond traditional open hours for the bakeries. In the meantime, Berle expected continued focus on using data to gain further insight into customer behavior.
The Outstanding Operators Program highlights 20 innovative brands taking creative paths to success with all things off-premises. Each winner receives a $1,000 charitable donation to their organization of choice and will be recognized on-stage at the 2026 Food On Demand Conference. Register today!
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