If you’ve spent any time in one of the Caesars Entertainment casinos lining the Las Vegas Strip, you’ve seen the colorful Carlo’s Bakery cake slice ATMs—temperature-controlled vending machines dispensing favorite flavors from the Hoboken, New Jersey-based bake shop made famous on the TV series Cake Boss.
They’ve become ubiquitous here and across the country, and can also be found at several malls around the Valley. And the vending machines are only one sign of the recent expansion of baker and TV personality Buddy Valastro’s business growth in Las Vegas.
Valastro, who started working at the family business at age 11—the original Carlo’s Bake Shop opened in 1910 and was purchased by his father in 1964—became a culinary celebrity after starring in Cake Boss on TLC and moving on to several successful Food Network shows. He teamed with Las Vegas-based hospitality stars Elizabeth Blau and Kim Canteenwalla to open his first restaurant, Buddy V’s, at the Venetian in 2013, along with an outpost of Carlo’s Bakery.
“When we started with Buddy V’s, I didn’t think we had the best location, kind of off the beaten path,” Valastro says of the restaurant’s Grand Canal Shoppes space. “But I believe if you produce a quality experience and let people know, they will find you, and Buddy V’s has continued to grow.”
The cake ATMs came next, but over the past few years, Valastro’s Vegas operation has exploded with three more casual restaurant venues. He opened the Strip-side PizzaCake eatery at Harrah’s just before the pandemic closures, and last year he debuted the Boss Café and Buddy’s Jersey Eats at the Linq.
Familiar East Coast-style Italian favorites like pizza, sandwiches, wings and those signature sweets are available at the new spots, and last summer Valastro Restaurants teamed with LBX Food Robotics to launch an innovative hot-food vending operation serving the bakery-style pizza available at the Boss Café. The Bake Xpress machines are also at the Linq.
Valastro says he was initially skeptical about the vending business but the cake slice machines proved themselves quickly. “I did it on a handshake and put three [machines] in Toronto, and they moved 50,000 cake slices in a month and a half,” he says. “We made an investment in the packaging so we could better control the atmosphere, because there are no preservatives in the cake, and we went from a 3-5-day shelf life to 20-25 days, and the product is still premium. Once I knew that, I had to take it to Vegas.”
The hot food expansion was inspired by the idea of offering a warm cookie from a vending machine, and the unique, focaccia-like pizza from the Boss Café turned out to be a good fit for the new machines.
“We always talked about, wouldn’t it be cool to be able to deliver hot food, and we knew the technology was out there, but it wasn’t readily available until a few years ago,” says Bryan Forgione, the company’s corporate executive chef. “We figured it out, and now it holds up to 70 slices of pizza we make fresh every day.
“We load up the machine, and it’s running 24 hours. You choose your slice, a robotic arm grabs it and delivers it to an infrared oven, and it knows exactly what it needs to do. It takes a few minutes, and the door opens and you have a hot, crispy slice of pizza to take up to your room.”
Forgione started with Valastro as executive chef at Buddy V’s and recently traveled to New Orleans to open a second location of PizzaCake in a food hall at the Harrah’s casino property there. He says 2023 will be another exciting year for the company, with concepts coming soon to Pompano Beach, Florida, and Atlantic City, New Jersey.
The pizza machines could follow the example of the cake ATMs and expand, too. “We have an idea in the works of how to do this on a bigger scale,” Forgione says. “We took a lot of time with it, a lot of trial and error and pizza after pizza. It’s not just about making something convenient, because if it’s convenient but not very good, what good is it?”
The company also maintains an off-Strip headquarters, where products are shipped and stored, something of a distribution hub for Valastro’s local restaurants and bakeries.
“We want to do more in Vegas, and I have a great team out there,” Valastro says. “I believe in the market, and when we do these new concepts, people are receptive. We’re all in. And I like to do things that I feel like are not there yet, missing links kind of stuff.”
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