The Story of the Agbay Cake Leveling Tools

This is a little history about us as well as how the products came about and the new features we have added that are not available in any other cake levelers.

During the mid 90’s, I was working with a very prominent Wedding Cake Designer in Worcester, MA. The wedding cakes we made were sometimes quite large with many tiers. A single tier could be as much as 20’ in diameter, 6” high and split several times. This would require an easy, efficient and accurate method to level and split these cakes. As I worked with her leveler, I was having all kinds of problems. The leveler would break causing difficulties adjusting the height, adjustment knobs stripped and would not clamp properly, cakes came out uneven because the blade was too loose and the unit was unstable, etc. I turned to my husband Tony who is a mechanical product design engineer to help me solve these problems.

At first, Tony repaired the leveler a number of times and made some alterations and improvements. This would help for awhile but eventually something else would break. Finally Tony decided that it just wasn’t worth trying to fix anymore and he suggested that we purchase a professional quality tool that would be more dependable. When I told my boss, she said that it was the best one on the market. Hearing that, Tony decided to design a new one for me to make my job easier.

He wanted to design a tool that would be of the highest professional quality, easy to use, accurate every time no matter what type or size cake I was dealing with, and one that would never break. He watched me at work on many occasions to evaluate the problems I was having and compiled a list of design criteria.

The list included:

• Must be strong, professional quality, and designed to last
  
• Easily adjustable for different size cakes
  
• Wide foot design capable of standing on its own
  
• Easy-to-read scales for quick and accurate height adjustments
  
• Large headroom above the blade to accommodate extra tall cakes
  
• Blade capable of cutting through all types of cakes, even cakes with fruit and nuts
  
• Blade under tension to prevent climbing and digging into cake
  
• Clamp design that that doesn’t damage adjustment rod
  
• Blade cover for safety purposes when not in use

Tony then started designing the new cake leveling tool and after a number of changes, adjustments, and improvements, came up with a new model. I ‘loved’ it, as did my boss. We called on members on the Massachusetts and Connecticut Chapters of I.C.E.S. and the Connecticut Icing Artists Club to demonstrate the leveler at upcoming meetings to get some feedback and to evaluate the overall interest in a product such as this. The response was overwhelmingly positive and the members wanted to know how soon they could have one for themselves. They couldn’t believe how quickly, accurately and precisely a cake could be leveled and layered. Tony demonstrated the accuracy of the leveler by cutting layers as thin as 1/8th inch.

Their enthusiasm led us to an initial production run, and several people purchased the new leveler. Response from these people was wonderful. We heard comments like “You’ve got to take this to the ICES Convention”, “I love it”, “I don’t know how I got along without it”, “I use it on every cake”, “It’s so great”, “I was able to do a seven layer cake; something that I would never have attempted to do before” and so on. Their comments convinced us that this was something needed by cake decorators and bakers alike. As a result, we applied for a patent, formed our Corporation, and went into production. We officially introduced our Agbay Cake Leveling Tool at the ICES Convention in Kansas City, MO in 1999. Again at the convention, response was very positive and our new business had been launched. Now other cake decorators and bakers could know just how easily and accurately they too could save time and hassle while creating their wonderful masterpieces.

In the fall of 2002 at an RBA Convention in Atlantic City, we were approached by many bakers with small or mid-sized bakeries. They needed to level and split at the same time to save time and asked Tony about designing a double blade leveler. Well, he did and the “Deluxe” version was introduced at the ICES Convention in Las Vegas in 2003. Not only could you easily level and split a cake with one pass, but the lower blade could go to just 1/8th inch above the work surface, something not possible with the Original Leveler. At that same time, he designed the indispensable Blade Cleaning Tool.

So here we are now in 2009 introducing yet another new and improved version of our leveler. The new Agbay Upgradeable Single Blade Cake Leveler offers the same features previously only available on the Deluxe allowing it to be set as low as 1/8th inch above the work surface. It also has a very nice new attractive finish, and most importantly, it can easily be upgraded to an Agbay “Deluxe” in the future.