There’s an orchestrated beauty to the chaos that is Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Colorful beads rain down from second-story balconies, blaring brass bands float down Bourbon Street and masses of body-painted, parade-goers cheer and dance throughout the French Quarter.

A year’s worth of celebration is packed into the long weekend leading up to “Fat Tuesday,” the final day before Lent begins. The Haydel family knows the energy of that intense pace well. In the two months before Fat Tuesday, Haydel’s Bakery ships 60,000 freshly baked and sweetly iced Mardi Gras “king cakes” all over the world. It’s the business’s greatest moneymaker, but distributing its delicious product is no piece of cake.

“Mardi Gras season would be a heapa mess without UPS,” says Dave Haydel Jr., whose grandfather founded the bakery. “We’ve tried everyone, and we found UPS’s on-time overnight delivery light years ahead of everyone else.”

A little of that human touch

New Orleans is a place where what you know matters, who you know kicks it up a notch … and how you know ices the deal.

Up to 80 percent of the company’s annual revenue comes at Mardi Gras. King cakes – made of danish dough, braided with cinnamon and sugar, and adorned with Mardi Gras-colored icing of purple, green and gold– must go out and arrive on time.

Innovation rounds of the recipe

From a custom manifest system to its own call center taking orders, innovation has spearheaded growth at Haydel’s. It’s less a traditional warehouse than a modern assembly line, with cakes popped from ovens, conveyed through icing and sprinkling, rolled into packaging, then loaded directly onto a dedicated UPS “package car,” the typical Brown delivery truck.

Leading up to Mardi Gras, a UPS driver parks his personal vehicle in Haydel’s lot every afternoon at 5 and takes a package car filled with king cakes to the UPS shipping center. After his sorting shift, the driver returns an empty package car at midnight to Haydel’s loading dock for the bakery to fill the next day. At peak demand, UPS replaces the package car with an even larger truck.

UPS has seamlessly integrated its technology into existing Haydel’s processes, allowing operators with just a keystroke or two to send a king cake almost anywhere in North America or to more than 220 countries or territories.

Dave Haydel agrees. “From Thanksgiving to Mardi Gras, our business is pedal to the metal, and we’re limited only by the constraints of the human body,” he says. “Now we’ve started talking about the rest of the year. We’re out to invent demand, to find another niche. And whatever we end up doing, UPS will be our partner.”