London will soon boast its very own cupcake ATM – a candyfloss-pink hole in the wall dispensing cupcakes 24/7, just in case we need to scratch an itch for garishly iced sponge confection in the middle of the night.
The cupcake automat is the latest marketing wheeze of US cupcake bakery Sprinkles, which proudly installed one in the wall of its Beverly Hills bakery this month. The machine has been churning out up to 1,000 cupcakes a day – crashing at one point due to over-demand – to customers happy to queue 50-deep and pay $3.50 a pop for the privilege.
Somehow it doesn't seem very artisan for a bakery that makes such a big deal of its "handcrafted" goodies, but Sprinkles is too busy plotting new ATM locations to care about the carpers. Spokeswoman Nicole Schwartz says the search is on for the "perfect" London location and a bakery with ATM attached will open "soon".
The machine works like this. A rack of 600 cakes sits in the wall behind the dispenser. You tap your order into a touch-screen, a robot arm behind the wall retrieves your selection and whoosh; out pops your choice of cupcake, meticulously packaged. Sprinkles insists the cakes are no more than a couple of hours old because its round-the-clock bakery constantly restocks the machine.
This important advance in spongy dispensing technology appears to confound predictions that the cupcake bubble is fit to burst. Consider the evidence: the so-called fad is now well into its second decade and last year Americans chomped through 670 million cupcakes in the 12 months to last October. A global love-in for cupcake devotees called Cupcake Camp - an "ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and eat cupcakes in an open environment" - is thriving.
There was one such jamboree here in Bournemouth last weekend and let me tell you, there is life in this baked good yet. The Bournemouth Pavilion positively shimmered in the saccharine glow of almost 3,000 vividly iced cakelettes and heaved with cupcake groupies. The event was convivial enough but had the atmosphere of a New Year sale, as sugar-jagged adults deployed sharp elbows to nab the best cakes.
If the vending machine – not traditionally a byword for dining excellence – might ever be rehabilitated, cupcakes might just have the pulling power to do it. Japan is the undisputed leader in this field, famously boasting one vending machine for every 24 citizens. Japanese consumers happily buy everything from knickers and trainers to miso soup and chicken katsu from the ubiquitous metal boxes that dot streets and railway stations. The latest shtick in Japan is facial recognition technology which enables drink machines to identify the age and gender of a customer before recommending an appropriate beverage. For example, a woman in her 20s prefers a slightly sweeter drink. Apparently.
