30 Calorie Cupcakes
30 CALORIE CUPCAKES – June 3, 2024 – Berkeley, California, USA
Morning sunbeams streamed through the cupcake shop’s east facing front door. Cupcakes wearing hats of swirled frosting stood at attention in neat rows inside the glass display cases. As the baking ovens cooled just out of view, they infused the air with the smell of sugar, chocolate, and cinnamon. The syrupy sweetness naturally triggered happy thoughts.
The sign on the door labeled “30 Cakes” said the shop was open, but the bell that signaled arriving customers remained stubbornly quiet. No one shuffled over the creaky hardwood floors deciding on cupcake flavors. The only sounds inside the store were the frustrated sighs from the owners, Jordan and Maisey.
“Remember the days when we couldn’t keep up with the drive-thru window?” Jordan asked dreamily. “We barely had a chance to sit until the afternoon.”
“Where did it all go wrong?” Maisey added, while nervously playing with the straps on her apron.
“For a while there, we had it all figured out.”
“Did people fall out of love with cupcakes or just us?”
“Probably both.”
The couple opened their shop in a location once used for drive-thru coffee. While they continued to sell coffee and other drinks, they mostly concentrated on cupcakes. They chose the name “30 Cakes” because they imagined having 30 cupcake flavors. A cupcake also seemed like something you could eat in 30 seconds. In another nod to the number, both Jordan and Maisey were turning 30 as the business got started.
They had carefully planned and saved money. The timing and location seemed perfect. Three months after their grand opening, Covid19 lockdowns arrived and turned the careful plans upside down.
At first, they thought they were in catastrophic trouble. Then they realized they could keep the drive-thru window open and add delivery service. Customers trapped in their homes wanted sweet comfort and 30 Cakes happily provided. Cars lined up halfway around the block. 30 Cakes launched their own phone app and got customers hooked on trying and rating new flavors.
For a while, devouring creations from 30 Cakes was the daily bright spot for hundreds of people. They used the app to send suggestions for new cupcakes and did not mind 30 Cakes tracking their preferences. The hours were long, but Jordan and Maisey loved churning out classic recipes in high volumes and the chance for inventive baking. Their sales numbers justified hiring two more employees.
Sometimes Maisey would talk with her vegan and health food loving friends and question whether 30 Cakes was doing more harm than good.
“Should we feel bad for filling these inactive people up on fat and sugar?” she asked Jordan.
“No one’s forcing them. And think of the joy you’re bringing to their lives.”
Maisey’s misgivings were typically short-lived and buried by the excitement of baking and business success.
As the Covid lockdowns eased up and life lurched back to the way it once was, the store stayed busy. Loyal customers seemed addicted to 30 Cakes. Jordan and Maisey became convinced they had devised a successful formula and the natural next step was expansion. They scouted locations for a second store in Oakland, but before signing a new lease, they noticed a disturbing dip in customer visits.
“It’s probably just a blip. A seasonal thing. Still, I’d feel better if we waited on that second store until we know for sure,” a concerned Jordan concluded.
They waited and the downward trend continued.
Jordan attempted to explain it as a rise in new dessert trends. “Designer cookies are hot right now. So are fancy sodas and boba drinks. And I’ve seen lots of new things with ice cream.”
Cupcake sales kept falling. They let go of one of the extra employees and then the other. They tried new promotions including buy-one-get-one-free hours and discounts for friend referrals. Nothing seemed to help. Introducing exciting cupcake flavors had none of the former appeal.
Jordan came up with more explanations. “People are out and about again. They’re trying to lose their Covid weight and are counting calories. They don’t have as much room for cupcakes anymore.”
Instead of the 30 cupcake varieties they made during peak sales, Jordan and Maisey dropped to their ten best sellers. And they made those in much smaller batches. They ended up throwing away a lot of cupcakes.
As they surveyed their customer-free store on that June morning, Maisey continued fidgeting with her apron strings. Jordan nervously wiped down the counters for a second time. He loudly sighed before saying, “We may need a hard pivot to something else.”
“What else?”
“Maybe ice cream, but it’s so seasonal. I’ve heard people are doing great things with marshmallows. What if we could invent something brand new, like the cronut?”
“Something like that’s kind of a long shot.”
“We could concentrate on coffee. Add hot chocolate and all the sugar drinks.”
“It didn’t work out for the people who were here before us.”
“Our problem is the calorie count,” Jordan said in frustration. “People only have so many calories to indulge and they aren’t using them on cupcakes anymore. If only we could cut the calories.”
“We’ve already tried a million times. Stevia and yogurt are never going to replace sugar and butter. But I’m open to any new suggestions you’ve got.”
Jordan shook his head and muttered, “I don’t know. But we can’t continue like this. We’ll lose the store and then what are we supposed to do?”
“I can’t go back to working for somebody else.”
“Neither can I.”
“I love making cupcakes,” Maisey said, on the brink of tears.
“I know. Me too,” Jordan answered sympathetically. He slowly tapped his index finger on the glass counter the way he usually did when lost in thought. After a quiet minute, he said in almost a whisper, “What if we let people think our cupcakes only had 30 calories?”
“They’re not even close. More like 250 calories. How could we lie and say they’re 30?”
“We wouldn’t lie. We would simply imply. We could call them “30 Cal” cupcakes. The “Cal” could mean a lot of things. Maybe California. The “30” could refer to the name of our shop. If people assume 30 Cal means 30 calories, that’s up to them.”
Maisey grinned at the idea but replied, “I don’t know. Sounds sketchy.”
“We could even put somewhere in little letters that the cupcakes have 30 calories per bite and not in total, and the name 30 Cal does not refer to calorie count.”
“Now you sound like a dirty lawyer.”
“C’mon, this wouldn’t be the crime of the century. Maybe we’d be slightly misleading, but it’s for a very good cause.”
“What’s the good cause?”
“We’d get to keep doing what we love.”
Maisey let the idea sink in for a few minutes before saying, “Maybe we could treat it as a little experiment.”
The experiment did not take long to implement. They simply printed some labels that read “30 Cal” and some others that read “Normal Calories.” They took some of the already made cupcakes and placed them in cases with the 30 Cal labels and left identical cupcakes in the Normal Calorie cases. On their app, they advertised a deal for a free 30 Cal cupcake with the purchase of a regular cupcake. In the tiniest of letters, buried in the app’s legalese, they added a message revealing that 30 Cal cupcakes contained 30 calories per bite.
The store’s few remaining customers were happy to try a 30 Cal cupcake version. After the first bite, they were stunned.
“These taste exactly like the regular version!” a daily visitor proclaimed.
“Good. That’s the idea,” Jordan said happily in reply.
“I can’t believe these are low calorie.”
Jordan simply smiled.
“Wow! How’d you do it?”
“That’s our little secret.”
“Let me guess. You used monk fruit as a sweetener.”
“I’m not telling.”
Word spread faster than Jordan and Maisey anticipated. The discovery of a delicious, 30 calorie treat with no weird aftertaste was the modern day equivalent of a gold strike. Friends told friends who told friends. People drove twenty miles in traffic to taste for themselves.
Within a week, the shop was selling out of everything labeled 30 Cal by early afternoon. Jordan and Maisey put fewer and fewer Normal Calorie cupcakes on display until they were only using a few dozen for show. Any customer who bought one simply did it to compare the taste with what they assumed was the healthier, low-calorie version. The 30 Cal cupcakes rapidly became the shop’s entire business as sales volumes soared back to peak levels.
The turnaround brought hope and anxiety, especially for Maisey. She watched in horror as one customer loaded a dozen 30 Cal cupcakes into a bag and said, “I might eat all of these myself when I get home. Only 360 total calories. That’s like a bowl of cereal.”
Maisey bit her tongue but desperately wanted to warn the woman that she would actually be eating 3000 calories. Later that evening, she confided to Jordan, “This is not good. I feel terrible and we’re going to get caught.”
“Who’s going to catch us? No one wants to mess with a good thing when they find it.”
Maisey shook her head. “Nah, someone’s going to figure it out and then we’ll be all over social media. We’ll look like the biggest tools in the world for letting people gorge cupcakes.”
“Then maybe it’s a matter of slowing them down. What if we limited everyone to two?”
“How would we possibly do that? That wouldn’t make any sense to people.”
“We invent a reason. How about saying more than two causes gastronomical distress. Stomachaches. Diarrhea.”
“That would make me stop. It would make me never want to try them in the first place.”
Jordan laughed. “To work, it needs to sound a little scary. And we’ve already got hundreds of people who have eaten them with no problems. They’re sure to come back and keep telling their friends.”
“I don’t know. It sounds pretty suspect,” Maisey said with a nervous frown.
“I’m happy to keep doing what we’re already doing,” Jordan replied.
After Maisey watched more people hungrily load up bags of cupcakes, she decided the stomachache plan was better than doing nothing. They put up warning signs the next morning.
“These are going to make me sick?” worried customers asked.
“As long as you eat two or less per day, you’ll be perfectly fine. Guaranteed,” Jordan replied reassuringly. “Eating more than that is a risk.”
“What if I have a sensitive stomach? Maybe they’ll affect me no matter how many I eat.”
“We’ve tested lots of people. Everyone is fine with two or less.”
When they first went up, Jordan and Maisey did not realize just how anxious the warning signs would make people. They had the potential to destroy the shop. No one wanted to get sick. Fortunately for the owners, the appeal of a 30-calorie cupcake was stronger than the fear of indigestion. And plenty of customers had already proved to themselves they could handle the mystery cupcake ingredients.
With very meager strategizing, Jordan and Maisey threaded a supply and demand needle. Sales per customer dropped, but overall sales remained high. When they used their app to track cupcake consumption, they found that before the introduction of the 30 Cal, average customers ate 2.5 cupcakes per day. When the 30 Cal appeared, that number jumped to 4.5. The warning signs amazingly dropped the average to a much healthier 1.5.
One happy customer told Maisey, “I personally have no problem digesting them. And at 30 calories, that’s less than a bunch of carrot sticks, and much tastier. I use one as my incentive every time I exercise.”
Maisey smiled in return and said, “Sounds like a healthy plan.”
“I wish I knew your secret ingredients.”
“I’ll never tell. Just remember not to eat more than two per day.”
As Jordan and Maisey contemplated hiring another employee to help with cupcake sales, Jordan chuckled to himself. “We may be the first food business that ever grew by telling people to eat less.”
“How long do you think we can keep this up?” Maisey wondered.
“As long as people keep assuming and we don’t draw too much attention to ourselves.”
Maisey sighed. “I guess I’ve made peace with what we’re doing. If it lets us keep making cupcakes.”
“It’s like how the sugary cereal people say they’re part of a balanced breakfast. 30 Cal cupcakes are part of a balanced lifestyle. If everyone plays along.”
Please remember to subscribe for weekly reminders about new stories. You can subscribe by clicking here: Subscribe. You can also follow new content on any Podcast platform or on YouTube. For the full list of stories, return Home.