ABOUT LORI KARMEL

I wasn't always a strategist. I was a customer.

I was looking for a great cake for my son's third birthday. I found We Take The Cake, loved the product, saw an opportunity in the brand, and bought the company. I had no food industry background. No culinary degree. No industry contacts. What I had was an operator's instinct, a refusal to guess my way through decisions, and an absolute intolerance for doing things that didn't make business sense.

The first two years were hard. There were months where survival felt like the goal. The month we turned a $19 profit I was genuinely proud. Not because the number was impressive — because we were building something real. We were profitable before the boost. That mattered to me then and it still does.

Then Oprah named us one of her Favorite Things.

What most people don't talk about is what happens after a moment like that. The feature doesn't build the business. What you do with it does. It became my job to keep us in the media, keep the sales growing, and turn that one moment into something that lasted. That meant building strategic partnerships one at a time — Williams Sonoma, Goldbelly, Neiman Marcus, QVC, 1-800-Flowers, Whole Foods. It meant learning when to say yes and when to walk away. It meant understanding that a big order is not the same as a profitable order, that a famous retail partner is not the same as the right retail partner, and that scaling something broken just breaks it faster.

Nothing fell into my lap. Every partnership, every media placement, every channel decision took strategy, thought, and effort. I made mistakes that cost real money. I also made decisions that most operators in my position wouldn't have had the clarity to make — like walking away from a mass retail deal that would have required $200,000 in equipment investment at margins that couldn't absorb a single mistake.

I exited We Take The Cake in 2020 after 18 years.

I started Karmel and Company because I kept meeting food operators who were talented, hardworking, and stuck in the exact same patterns I recognized from my own early years. They were making sales. People loved their products. They were working harder than they ever expected. And the math still didn't add up.

They didn't need encouragement. They needed the truth. That's what I give them.