The $30 wedding cake: couples are trading specialty bakers for the grocery aisle

The $30 wedding cake: couples are trading specialty bakers for the grocery aisle

A $1,000 centerpiece now has a $30 rival

A specialty baker building your dream wedding cake can bill more than $1,000. A half sheet cake from Costco runs about $30, and buying a few of them feeds the whole reception. With the average American wedding now costing about $36,000, according to the wedding-planning site Zola, couples are moving the cake out of the splurge column and into the grocery budget.

Two brides, two supermarket chains

Lily Alana Stewart, who married last year in central Alabama, was not willing to skip the tradition. "You can't skip the cake," she said. "Everybody looks forward to a cake at a wedding." She ordered hers from Publix, the Southern grocery chain, which folded the baby's breath she used to decorate the venue into the cake's design. Her co-workers at the reception were stunned when they learned where it came from. Anna Holleran, who married this year in California's Bay Area, collected her wedding cake from Costco. "Their cakes are so good," she said. "How can you go wrong?"

Publix undercuts the national average by $1.50 a slice

Zola puts the average wedding cake at about $5.50 a slice. Publix comes in roughly $1.50 cheaper per slice, and still delivers the classic three-tiered, white-frosted look, with a tasting flight that lets couples sample four flavors, including red velvet and carrot, before ordering. In the Birmingham, Alabama, area, a chocolate cake with fondant that serves 94 people is listed at $388.

The chain says cake sales are up 50% since 2020

Publix is openly courting the business. Jeff Brancato, a retail improvement specialist at the chain, said stores around Birmingham sell about 50% more wedding cake than they did before 2020. "There is definitely big savings," he said. Costco takes the opposite approach, never listing its half sheet as a wedding cake at all; it works out to about 70 cents a slice, and the company did not respond to NPR's interview request.

The cake is the smallest line in a very large bill

That is why this looks more like a psychological win than a financial one. Zola's survey puts the average wedding near $36,000. The Knot's 2026 Real Weddings Study, covering 10,474 couples who married in 2025, reports an average of $34,200 and a median of about $24,000, while the research firm The Wedding Report estimates the median 2025 wedding at $18,231. Within The Knot's data, cake averages $530. Cutting it entirely would not change the shape of a $34,000 wedding.

A third of couples are willing to cut cake, not tradition

Emily Forrest, head of communications at Zola, said roughly a third of couples surveyed by the site would consider spending less on cake and dessert. "Every couple always has to sit down and say, 'Where are we going to save, and where are we going to splurge?'" she said. "And cakes just don't seem to rise to the splurge occasion for a lot of couples." The cake gets trimmed because it is the easiest line to trim, not the largest.

Inflation and tariffs are lifting everything else

The bigger forces are harder to dodge. The Bank of America Institute found wedding spending among its customers up 8.5% in May from a year earlier, with the increase holding at 8.5% across the first half of the year. In Canada, CTV News reported on Jessica Korchowiec and Kai Helsdon, who budgeted 25,000 Canadian dollars and spent close to 40,000 after food, service, fuel and transport costs climbed amid trade friction. Reports from metro Detroit put tariffs in the same column of new wedding expenses.

Even guests are cutting back

The squeeze runs through the guest list too. Another Bank of America Institute survey found 57% of respondents said they would decline a wedding invitation from a close friend or relative for budget reasons, up 3 percentage points from 2025, and nearly half said couples expect too much financially for bachelor and bachelorette parties.

Blind taste tests put the supermarket on top

Supermarket cake is no longer an apology. Southern Living had editors taste white sheet cakes from six chains, including Costco, Publix, Sam's Club, Target, Walmart and Whole Foods, and Costco won, praised for the "right density of cake and icing." A separate taste test by The Kitchn priced a Publix eight-inch celebration cake at $23.99 against a Costco 10-inch white cake at $17.99. The trade-offs are real: Costco's half sheet comes in two flavors, and a membership starts at $65 a year.

Specialty bakers are changing how they sell

For custom bakers the shift is less an extinction than a rewrite. BakeStreet, a wedding cake booking platform, reports that orders serving 50 guests or fewer made up 47% of its 2026 wedding cake bookings, up from 39% in 2025, with two-tier cakes for 30 to 50 guests now the most common order and five-tier showpieces increasingly rare. There are counterexamples: Bredenbeck's, a Philadelphia bakery, went from about 200 wedding cakes a year a decade ago to roughly 1,300 today, a reminder that some couples still pay for custom work.

What to watch next

Publix's own website tells couples to allow at least four weeks, offers a free consultation and tasting, and delivers up to 15 miles from a store for a fee. The next questions are whether supermarkets turn wedding cakes into a permanent category rather than a side project, whether custom bakers start publishing prices to win back couples who shop on their phones, and whether a saving this small on a $34,000 day stays a cake story.