Baked Cravings is opening a fundraising arm built for schools and PTAs

For nine years, Baked Cravings has been the bakery the PTA calls. The Bergenfield shop opened in 2017 as a 100 percent nut-free operation, which made it one of the few places a school nurse could sign off on for a classroom party or a sports-team fundraiser. The orders started coming in. So did the consulting calls. Schools and corporate offices wanted help structuring fundraisers around the bakery’s cupcakes, cookies, and brownies, and the bakery kept saying yes.

That work was never a product line. It was the side of the business that grew without anyone planning it. The bakery donated to schools, walked organizations through how to run a dessert-based fundraiser, and built a list of repeat fundraising customers across the New York metro. After nearly a decade of doing the work informally, the owners decided to make it a division of its own. They are calling it Raise Cravings.

Raise Cravings takes what the bakery has been doing by hand and puts it on a digital-first platform. The pitch to a campaign creator (a PTA chair, a band director, a youth-sports treasurer) is simple: pick the bakery’s gourmet desserts, run the campaign through Raise Cravings, and 50 percent of sales go back to the organization. The bakery handles the rest of it, from the order page through national shipping.

The bakery is raising $124,000 on Honeycomb Credit to launch the division. The goal covers the platform build, the marketing to get the first wave of campaign creators on board, and the inventory and packaging that a fundraising-scale order looks different from a walk-in retail order.

Why the bakery turned to Honeycomb instead of a bank

A traditional small-business loan was not the right fit for funding a new division of an existing bakery. The Raise Cravings build is a software-and-marketing investment more than an equipment investment, which is a harder file for a commercial lender to underwrite against. The owners didn’t name a specific bank in the offering materials, but the structural mismatch was clear from the project: a nine-year-old bakery launching what is essentially a new product, with revenue that hasn’t happened yet on a platform that doesn’t exist yet.

The other path, an equity round, would have meant trading permanent ownership of a bakery the family has run since 2017 for capital to build a division they have already proven the demand for through nine years of off-the-books fundraising work. The community-funded loan structure on Honeycomb let the bakery raise capital, keep the business whole, and pay the money back over the life of the loan to the people who funded it.

A $31,591 raise from 22 investors

The campaign opened on February 24, 2026 and closed on March 26, 2026 with $31,591 raised from 22 investors against a $124,000 ceiling. The raise closed short of the ceiling but past the funding minimum that lets a Honeycomb loan close, which is the threshold that matters for the business. A Reg CF raise is all-or-nothing above the funding minimum; below it, no money moves and the campaign returns the commitments. Above it, the loan funds at whatever the campaign actually raised.

For Raise Cravings, the practical effect is that the division launches on a smaller initial budget than the offering’s ceiling envisioned. The platform still gets built. The marketing still runs. The bakery scales the rollout to the capital it actually has rather than the capital it asked for, which is a familiar shape for a small business that has been running fundraisers for other people for nine years.

The 22 investors who funded the raise are now 22 people with a small financial reason to pay attention to whether Raise Cravings finds its first campaign creators. For a fundraising platform whose growth depends on word-of-mouth between PTA chairs and youth-sports treasurers, that kind of network effect is the kind of asset a bank loan does not come with. Whether it plays out is the next twelve months of the business.

What the money does next

The funds go toward launching Raise Cravings and donating 50 percent of campaign sales back to the organizations that run them. Concretely that means finishing the platform build, onboarding the first cohort of fundraising campaigns, and producing at fundraising scale out of the Bergenfield kitchen.

The bakery itself keeps doing what it has been doing since 2017. The retail counter is open. The national shipping operation runs out of the same kitchen. The nut-free certification that made the bakery the school PTA’s first call in the first place is still the thing that makes Raise Cravings work. A fundraising platform that can ship to any classroom in the country without an allergy disclaimer is a narrow category, and it is the one Baked Cravings has been quietly occupying for nine years.