B2B teams are sending cakes to book meetings

There’s a micro-trend picking up in American B2B: cold caking. Instead of a cold email, you send a decision-maker an actual cake.

The idea isn’t particularly original. Teams have tried the same thing with pizzas, handwritten notes, gift boxes — you could hire a plane with a banner if you wanted. The goal is always the same: force attention. The only real question is whether the cost per lead still makes sense.

I came across a video about this, got curious, and decided to dig in: look for actual cases, actual numbers. There wasn’t much. Most of the content around cold caking is hype and founder Twitter threads with no data behind them. But one case stood out.

For context, I’m Rinat — founder of getsally.io, a B2B outbound agency working with 25+ teams across the US and EU. We run cold outreach at scale every day, so anything cold outreach-related that claims 35% conversion to meetings gets my attention (and my skepticism 😉).

A team in San Francisco used Apify to find 137 VC funds within a 20-minute walk from their office. They filtered the list to 24 relevant targets and ran an A/B test: 11 cakes delivered in person, the rest via courier. Personal delivery converted at 40% into meetings. Courier delivery performed significantly worse.

The unit economics: one cake with delivery runs $100–150. At a 35–40% conversion rate, a single meeting costs roughly $300–430.

I think the cakes were the least important part here. What actually made it work is that the team had three things most cold caking attempts won’t have:

Physical presence in the same area. They were in the Valley, targeting Valley VCs. A 20-minute walk. That’s essentially neighbourhood selling with a creative wrapper.

A tight, hand-picked list. 137 found, 24 filtered. Tier-1 targeting where every name on the list was deliberately chosen.

Personal delivery. The 40% conversion came from in-person drop-offs, not courier. The cake was an excuse to show up at the door — the real touchpoint was the human standing there with it.

Strip away any one of those elements, and the numbers probably collapse. Send cakes via courier to a raw list of 500 companies across the country, and you’re just running an expensive bakery loyalty program for strangers.

The deeper point here is about the attention problem, not about cakes. Digital outreach channels are drowning in AI-generated messages, and the inbox keeps getting noisier every quarter. Cold emails get ignored because there are simply too many of them to process — the quality of any individual message barely registers when the inbox is that crowded.

A $100 cake on someone’s desk is a proof of work. It signals that a real person spent real budget and real time to reach you. In a world of infinite automated touchpoints, that signal cuts through.

But we book 15–30 qualified meetings per month for our clients through cold outreach alone, without any physical touchpoints or creative stunts — and those meetings consistently convert into deals. What drives results is the precision behind the outreach.

Know your ICP. Know your decision-maker. Have a relevant offer.

When those three things are dialed in, a well-crafted cold email still gets through. The attention problem hits hardest when the targeting is lazy and the offer is generic.

Creative formats like cakes or handwritten notes can add an extra layer for Tier-1 accounts with large deal sizes and a narrow target list. For everyone else, the same $300 per meeting is better spent on tighter targeting and better sequences.

P.S. If you're running outbound right now and struggling to cut through the noise, grab 30 min on my calendar. Let’s see if we can help with that.

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