Costco or Publix: Who Offers the Best Vanilla Birthday Cake?

Nothing quite tops off a birthday celebration like a cake, and one of the easiest places to pick one up is at the grocery store bakery. If your town is anything like mine, there’s a whole lot of bakeries to choose from, but they’re much more expensive than a grocery store, and, if I’m being honest, many grocery chains offer some great fresh baked goods. So, how do two popular grocery store bakeries compare to each other? I was hungry to find out.

I picked up the most simple cakes I could find at Publix and Costco and put them to the test. In the instance of Costco, I had only a couple of simple birthday style cakes to choose from: vanilla or chocolate style. Publix had more options, but I chose the one that was the closest to the vanilla I had selected at Costco. To compare them, I considered three important aspects: flavor, texture, and cake decoration.

Just as I didn’t know much about Publix’s bakery before stepping foot in a store, the Costco bakery has felt like a whole new world to my family. Admittedly, I didn’t know a great deal about the selection of Costco bakery desserts before visiting the store for the first time, so I had no understanding of the many bakery tables absolutely full of muffins and pastries. Plus, there are many loaves of freshly baked bread and cinnamon rolls, among many other treats. In very short order, my family has fallen in love with the breads, muffins, cheesecakes, and breakfast breads, many of which are actually made from scratch.

Like the meat packing area, rotisserie chicken, and meal kit preparation kitchen, the bakery is largely open so that customers can see what’s happening inside the bakery. The operation is substantial, complete with industrial mixers, ovens, and all the trimmings of a stocked kitchen. With as enjoyable as everything has been, it’s only reasonable to assume that the birthday cake is going to be great too, but how would it compare to the lovely decorated options at Publix?

When my family first moved to Florida and entered a Publix for the first time, you might imagine we walked in and were immediately drawn to the sub counter, and while I love a Pub Sub, the bakery is what really surprised us. There are cakes, breads, pastries, and nearly anything you might want freshly made. Like any great bakery, you can also place orders for more customized treats, or if you’re like my family, a specific kind of bread that sells out quickly. In any case, while I’ve tried plenty of bar cakes and cheesecakes from Publix, I’ve never had one of the bakery’s birthday cakes.

You can order these specifically designed to fit your needs or you can choose one off the shelf. While I love a customized cake, the bakers do a nice job with the predesigned cakes too. It doesn’t need a whole lot more to feel special — candles, of course, but little else. This is the ideal solution for those looking to personalize a cake for a birthday party or simply want a cake for a special occasion. For the best selection, stop by on a Wednesday or Thursday as these are the best days of the week to shop at Publix. You could also order ahead to ensure exactly what you want is available.

The two cakes offer fairly similar compositions, including ingredients that you typically make a cake from in your very own kitchen. You’ll see sugar, flour, oil, and eggs among the listed items. Both cakes have some additives to help aid in preservation and texture, but the biggest difference between the two cakes is that the Costco cake has a vanilla cheesecake mousse inside, while the other cake has layers of buttercream.

Interestingly, neither store supplied nutritional information on the package, so I needed to seek it out in other ways. Through Costco’s chat feature on its website, I was able to ask an associate to look up the information for me. In each cake, there are 16 servings, and each individual slice is 440 calories with 21 grams of fat, 59 grams of carbohydrates, and a total sugar count of 46 grams.

To discover the nutritional information for the Publix cake, I reached out to the company, finally hearing back eight days after my initial email, while waiting, I called the store with the bakery I purchased the cake from to find the nutritional information. The associate I spoke to on the phone wasn’t sure how to answer my question, so she passed me onto someone else, and they didn’t know either. In fact, they told me that they weren’t even sure they had access to that information. Finally, Publix emailed me back and shared that each slice of the cake is 360 calories, 20 grams of fat, 43 grams of carbohydrates, and 33 grams of sugar. Publix also informed me that “Products in ready-to-eat form produced in store bakeries and delicatessens are exempt from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s requirements for nutritional labeling.” Even still, Costco had the information readily available — quickly — upon request.

Each time I have visited Costco, I’ve been impressed by the sheer number of bakery items available for sale. It seems that there’s so much that the store could never run out. And while I have seen some of the offerings a little on the low side, I’ll admit to never seeing a bakery item completely sold out when I’ve been in the store. The birthday cakes like the ones I purchased are available in the cooler case with other popular favorites like tuxedo cake and Costco’s basic cheesecake. I paid $16.99 for the 10-inch cake.

Publix has a much smaller bakery, but it’s still very well stocked, at least at my closest location. One thing Publix definitely has going for it is that the decoration here is at another level. I chose one of the more simply decorated cakes, but still found it to be quite pretty. There were some that were even more fully decked out that I could’ve selected, but I wanted something close to what I had already chosen from Costco. For this 8-inch cake, I paid $21.99.

I’ll admit that I have sampled a fair amount of Costco bakery items at this point. Most of them are absolutely stellar, and I must say, I prefer most of them to the birthday cake I picked up. Although the cake is nice and moist, the cheesecake filling is the real star of the show. It makes you want an entire cake out of that mousse, and I’ll be frank, the basic cheesecake at Costco outshines this birthday cake by a margin.

The frosting is also very enjoyable, and it coats the outside of the cake. The decoration seems to be made out of similar frosting, though I did notice that it was starting to bleed into the white over a couple of days in the fridge. The decoration is also a little more on the simple side than I would like to see. It would be nice to see Costco up its game in terms of decoration, getting closer to Publix in this way.

Another way Costco could better compete with Publix by adding an online order feature on its app. Using a pen and paper method, Costco’s way of ordering custom cakes is outdated. Publix, on the other hand, has an online order feature.

My favorite cake over at Publix is the carrot cake. My family and I love picking up a bar version of it, and it’s one of the standout options for us from that bakery. Like the carrot cake, this particular birthday cake was light and fluffy. I also found the buttercream to be very much on the sweet side with a nice flavor. It needs ice cream or something similar to feel special, but it’s a good basic cake.

The decoration on the Publix cake is quite nice. I chose one that was a little bit more simply decorated, but even still, the flowers felt elevated and a little more elegant. I found that the flavors of the flowers were just as enjoyable as the frosting, which is nice, because there were quite a few flowers on top of the cake.

Ultimately, the Costco birthday was more enjoyable than the Publix one. Although, I’ll admit, that it was by far less of a measure than I expected. The Publix cake had better decoration than the Costco one, but overall flavor, especially because of the vanilla cheesecake, really put Costco over the edge.

That said, I can imagine either cake being enjoyed at a party. Something you might want to consider is purchasing one of these cakes in enough advance to decorate it for a theme. There’s much you can do at home to elevate a grocery store bakery cake to be exactly what you want it to be. So, while Costco’s decorations may need a little bit of work, there’s no reason you can’t put that work in at home to make it extra special and unique.

My biggest takeaway is that Costco’s birthday cake shouldn’t be discounted. If you’re looking for something a little on the simple side. However, I encourage you to seek out some of the other cakes Costco has on hand. Maybe it’s time to make one of the other cakes into the new birthday cake, like the tuxedo cake, a luxurious year-round Costco bakery find.

To compare these birthday cakes, I picked up one of each from the two bakeries. I cut a slice out of each and directly compared them.

I considered the flavor and texture of the cake bite and the decoration on the cake, though I prioritized flavor and texture over this decoration. I was interested in choosing a cake that tasted great and one with a nice look. For texture, I was hoping to find something moist but fluffy rather than dense and dry.