What your prospect sees when they scan the QR on the cake

You picked the design, wrote the message and checked out. Then the cake leaves, and you do not get to see the moment that matters most: the minute someone at your prospect’s office opens the box and scans the code. Below, we walk you through that minute, step by step, as the recipient experiences it. So you know what you are sending, and what to do next.

First, the box

It starts at the office. ColdCake brings the cake itself, by hand, in Flanders and Brussels, with no courier in between. With a cake from the builder, you chose how: Surprise, and we hand it to whoever is there, or Scheduled, and we first call the company to agree a moment with the right person. Wrote a line for our delivery person? They say it word for word at the handover.

Someone opens the box. On top is your design in edible ink, with your message on it and a QR code, also in edible ink. There is no card and no leaflet. Behind that code sits your video.

That is a deliberate choice. A card gets lost or ends up with the recycling. The code is on the cake itself, so as long as the cake is on the table, the invitation to scan is too.

The scan

Your prospect picks up their phone and points the plain camera at the code. No app to install, no account to create. A page opens in the browser: “One moment. Your camera is about to open.” The page asks for camera access, then gives one instruction: point your camera at the design on the cake.

This is also the only wait. Camera and AR need a moment to start. That start-up is what we are working on hardest, and we would rather tell you ourselves than have you hear it from your prospect.

The design starts to move

Then it happens. On the screen, your design starts to move, right on the cake in front of them, on their own table. The cake itself does not move; the image on the screen does. It just does not feel that way. To the recipient, it is a cake that comes to life the moment they look at it. That is augmented reality, or AR: your phone lays an image over the real world.

In the builder you choose what moves: your own video, or a short video ColdCake makes of your design. If your video has sound, it plays along, or the recipient turns it on with one tap. Saving or sharing the video takes one button.

Then the message

Your message is already on the cake, in your design. After the scan there can be one more: at the top it says who the cake is from, below that your line if you wrote one. If you added a link in the builder, your button follows: to a meeting, your site or a case.

That gives you something printed text cannot. That extra message sits behind the code and not in the ink, so we can still change it on your request until the cake has left.

The tabs: who, what and what is in it

Scroll on for three tabs.

• Your cake. Who it is from, your message, your button and the design itself, with zoom.
• About ColdCake. A few lines on what ColdCake is, for anyone wondering where this came from. With a button to build a cake of their own, with a discount, and one to give us their view in a minute.
• What is in it. A Belgian partner bakery bakes the cake fresh, to order. The design is in food-safe edible ink. The allergens are listed, all 14 from Annex II of EU Regulation 1169/2011. Every cake is covered in marzipan, which contains almonds. And how to keep it: best today, keep it cool, tomorrow works too.

That last tab looks like a detail. It answers the question every office asks before anyone picks up a knife: what am I eating? Then the knife can go in. Cut in and share it with the team.

What you get out of it

For you, it does not stop at the scan. After delivery you get a photo by email of the cake where it was delivered. Want to know whether your cake was scanned? Ask us. If it was, you are not calling cold.

Put that next to the inbox. The median cold email gets a 1.5% reply rate (Woodpecker 2025). An email disappears among the rest. A cake reaches a person and gets shared with the team, and the scan gives you a concrete reason to follow up.

What it is not

A few things we would rather say plainly.

• No app, but a real browser. If the link lands in an app’s built-in browser, the page asks to open it in Safari or Chrome and scan again.
• No notification. No automatic email goes out when your cake is scanned. The scan reaches us, and you ask us.
• No guaranteed reply. The cake opens the door, the conversation is yours. We do not have a measured reply rate for ColdCake yet, and we will not pretend we do.
• Not forever. AR works on a phone or tablet with the camera on. With the camera off, they can watch the video on the same page. And once the cake is cut, the design is gone: the moment belongs to the day the cake arrives.

See it yourself

You only know how it feels once you try it. Open the AR demo on a second screen, scan the code with your phone, point it at the cake and see what your prospect sees. Ready to send one? Build your cake in the builder. Reaching several prospects every month? See the campaigns.