‘What the heck,’ a home baker thought when he first tried to sell fruitcake. Now, demand is so high he takes orders in May

Jim Hadfield is pictured with bins full of fruitcakes.

A baker who started selling a product on a whim, wondering whether anyone would be interested, is now so inundated with orders for a Christmas staple that next year, he’ll start taking orders in April.

Jim Hadfield has baked hundreds of fruitcakes this year.

The 74-year-old received more than 700 orders for the polarizing product ahead of the 2025 Christmas season, a record year for the home baker from a small Saskatchewan town. Those cakes will be shipped across the country, from B.C. to Newfoundland to the Northwest Territories.

Now a booming business, Hadfield first started to sell fruitcakes through a Facebook page called Jim’s Cakes & Christmas Fruit Cakes about six or seven years ago, and says it was slow at the beginning.

“I was under the impression that nobody liked fruitcake, but I made them for us, so I thought, ‘What the heck, I’ll throw them up there on my (Facebook) page and my website.”

The first year, he got about 28 orders. This year, he’s getting up at 3 a.m., and making 16 cakes a day. Next year, he said, he plans to increase his daily output to 32.

“Every year, the demand goes up and up and up,” he said Wednesday.

He gets so many requests that he starts taking orders in the spring, and this year cut off ordering on June 15. Still, he said he’s regularly getting messages from Canadians hopeful he can add one more to his list.

The Milestone, Sask., resident who’s been baking for 15 years credits word of mouth and a growing social media following to the unexpected success.

It’s an extensive process. He makes two types of cakes, the first step for which is marinating four kinds of glazed fruit overnight in either dark rum or orange liqueur.

He gets up early and starts with the batter, adding the fruit and nuts before baking the cakes for about three-and-a-half hours at a low temperature. Once baked and cooled, the cakes are basted with one of the two alcohols.

He bastes them again every week, a minimum of six times. The end result is what he calls a “very flavourful” cake.

“Everyone loves them,” he said.

The cakes are wrapped in foil and stored in plastic bins that fill up his living room. He said buyers can keep them in the fridge, but there’s no need. The key to preservation, according to Hadfield, is to keep them wrapped in foil.

Hadfield ships the cakes all over Canada, but personally delivers orders to customers in Regina, he told CTV News Regina in October.

When asked if it’s fun, baking and shipping hundreds of cakes, he said, “Well, I’m still doing it. I’ll be 75 next year, so I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to do it, but for now, yes, I still enjoy it.”

It’s too late to order a cake for this year, but those thinking ahead to the 2026 holiday season will be able to place their orders in the spring. He recommends they follow his 43,000-follower Facebook page, where he’ll post updates for now, and an order form in May.

With an interview from CTV’s Your Morning and files from CTV News Regina’s Mick Favel