By ANNE D’INNOCENZIO AP Business Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — Inside a Walmart store in New Jersey, a worker puts the finishing touches on a cake with an edible ink Sponge Bob on top. A colleague creates a buttercream rosette border for a different cake, while another co-worker frosts a tier of what will be a triple-deck dessert.

It’s graduation season, the busiest time of year for the 6,200 employees the nation’s largest retailer trained to hand-decorate cakes per customers’ orders. The cakes themselves come, pre-made, frozen and in a variety of shapes and sizes, from suppliers, not Walmart’s in-store bakeries.

But there’s no sugar-coating the importance the company places on its custom cake business. Its army of icing artisans are the highest paid hourly workers in a typical U.S. Walmart, excluding managers. Cake decorators earn an average of $19.25 per hour, compared with $18.25 for all non-managerial store workers, a company spokesperson said.

Melissa Fernandez, 36, started working in the electronics area and then the wireless services department of the Walmart in North Bergen, New Jersey, before she transferred to the deli area in search of better pay. But Fernandez had her eye on a cake decorating job and after spending two months getting trained by a store colleague, she picked up a piping bag full-time in 2021.

“I love baking at home. I love painting,” Fernandez said. “I love doing anything artistic, and I just always wanted to be a part of it.” After 11 years with Walmart, she said she now makes about $24.40 an hour.

Despite their elite status within Walmart, the retailer’s cake decorators have attracted detractors on social media.

The company promotes its personalized baked goods on TikTok, and the workers behind such creations do the same with their own profiles. As the content has grown in popularity, critics have accused Walmart decorators of stealing ideas and undercutting the work of professional cake artists with their low-priced products.

After TikTok videos praising Walmart’s $25 heart-shaped cakes with borders that resemble vintage lace cropped up before Valentine’s Day this year, a few bakers produced their own videos explaining why their cakes cost so much more and critiquing Walmart’s.

Debates ensued in the comments sections over whether Walmart represented evils of capitalism or served the needs of the masses.

A customized sheet cake that can be sliced to serve 96 people costs $59 at Walmart, about one-third to half the price that a nationwide sample of independent bakeries list online for similarly sized cakes. For $5.20 more, Walmart customers can add strawberry or “Bavarian creme” fillings, which like the bare cakes, are vendor-supplied.

The slice of the celebratory occasion cake market Walmart holds appears vast based on company-supplied figures. One out of four cakes sold in the U.S. comes from Walmart, and its employees will collectively decorate more than 1 million cakes during May and June, according to a company spokesperson.

The number of cakes decorated each day at the location where Fernandez works nearly doubles to 50-60 when school graduations come around, compared to 30-35 a day during the rest of the year, said Michael DeMarco, the manager of the store’s fresh food department. He credits the decorators’ talent and promotional efforts on TikTok.

“We’re getting a lot of repeat customers. We’re doing a lot more business because of just the viral sensations,” DeMarco said.

A TikTok video that showed Fernandez designing a $24 version of a customized bouquet cake — 12 cupcakes that are individually decorated and arranged to look like a bunch of flowers — received nearly a half-million views. The bouquet design was one of the North Bergen store’s most popular cakes last month, a company spokesperson said.

The dressy heart-shaped cakes, as well as cakes that resemble meals like sushi or a pile of spaghetti and meatballs, are popular too, she said. Fernandez also has created “burn away” cakes: an iced cake topped with an image printed on paper, which is set ablaze to reveal a different image underneath.

“TikTok helps me stay up to date,” she said. “A lot of trends that I see on there, within that week or within that month, customers will come asking about it. And we’re pretty up to date as well.”

Jazzing up a cake by hand requires skill, whether or not someone else did the baking, she said. Funneling buttercream frosting through a bag and various sized piping tips to yield the desired design without misplaced blobs is not the same as drawing or painting, Fernandez explained.

“There’s a lot of pressure points that you have to practice in order to get the borders correct and the right thickness or the right texture,” she said.

Tiffany Witzke, who has been a Walmart cake decorator since July 2016 and works at a store in Springfield, Missouri, has more than 912,000 followers on TikTok. The job attracts people who “can be extremely skilled and talented,” Witzke said, adding that customers want increasingly complicated designs.

“When I first started, it was basically just borders and writing,” she said. “Now, everybody wants more and more and more on their cake.”

Liz Berman, owner of The Sleepy Baker, in Natick, Massachusetts, said she’s not worried about losing customers to Walmart because of her attention to detail and the premium ingredients she uses.

She charges $205 and up for a half-sized sheet cake, the bouquets made up of two dozen miniature cupcakes cost $110. All the cakes are made from scratch, and Berman said she designs everything herself.

“It’s just a totally different business model,” she said. “Everything I do is custom.”

For Walmart, the cake decorating business delivers higher profit margins than some other areas, such as groceries and electronics, according to Marshal Cohen, chief retail advisor at market research firm Circana. But it’s also resonating with shoppers looking for affordable luxuries.

“We’ve gone into a period where the consumer is saying, ‘This is good enough,’” Cohen said.

Customers interviewed at the North Bergen store on a recent weekday seemed to be satisfied. George Arango, 34, picked up two customized cakes, one to celebrate a co-worker’s retirement and the other for a colleague getting another job. After researching prices on various store websites, he decided to give Walmart a try.

“The price is fantastic,” he said. “I’m walking out with two cakes for $40.”