Sweet! Cupcakes go mobile

LOS ANGELES — It's hard enough resisting a fresh cupcake sitting placidly in the bakery case. Now that cupcake is coming after you.

In what harks back to the heyday of the neighborhood delivery truck decades ago, Sprinkles Cupcakes of Beverly Hills will use a "Sprinklesmobile" to sell red velvet, lemon coconut, banana dark chocolate and other cupcake varieties starting this week.

"Mobile food is one of the hottest things going all over the country. Brooklyn has it ribs truck, Manhattan has its dessert trucks and now Los Angeles has the cupcake patrol," said Clark Wolf, a restaurant and food consultant in New York.

Certainly any construction worker who has eaten at a so-called "roach coach" or anyone who remembers the music of the ice-cream truck knows that mobile food is not new. What's different is the quality and the increasingly broad choices.

Sprinkles uses a chocolate-brown Mercedes Sprinter van with red hubcaps that replicate the trademark Sprinkles dot pattern that tops the company's treats.

There's no set route, but the company expects to develop relationships with large office buildings around the city so that the van can park outside during lunch breaks or after work, said Charles Nelson, who with wife Candace founded the company in 2005.

Cupcakes are a particularly timely food, Wolf said. They are an affordable indulgence that fits with the current recession.

Many of Sprinkles' mobile destinations will be in the beach cities and San Fernando Valley locations, far removed from the two Southern California Sprinkles stores in Beverly Hills and Newport Beach.

"People have asked us to open stores in their cities, but we don't want to dilute the Sprinkles brand, so this gives us a way to reach those customers," Candace Nelson said.

Still, cupcake fans will pay a premium for this service. Individually boxed, the treats will sell for $4 each, 75 cents more than what Sprinkles charges at its retail stores.

The van, which can hold 1,500 cupcakes, will do Hollywood events — it took a test run to the set of the HBO television show "Entourage" — and will be available for hire by private parties.

Sprinkles plans to announce most of the stops via the bakery's Twitter account.

"We already do a lot of promotions for our stores through Twitter and Facebook, so we are going to let people use those avenues to contact us and tell us where they want us to be, especially on the weekends when people are out and about," Charles Nelson said.

The van is a smart marketing move by the cupcake bakery, said Wesley Brown, a consultant with Iceology, a Los Angeles consumer-research and consulting company.

"The vehicle will scream what the food is about and say Sprinkles, not unlike the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile," Brown said. "You can't think of that vehicle and not smile."

In addition to its two Southern California bakeries, Sprinkles has stores in Dallas, Phoenix and Palo Alto, Calif.

On Sprinkles' Web site, Seattle is on the list of stores "coming soon," and the company invites visitors to vote for the next location.

Seattle already has three gourmet Cupcake Royale stores in Ballard, Madrona and West Seattle. Belltown has the Yellow Leaf Cupcake Co. Wallingford has Trophy Cupcakes. Wink Cupcakes is a catering service that bakes in a Lower Queen Anne facility. Look Cupcakes also caters with Seattle-area delivery. In Bellevue, there is a New York Cupcakes store.

Los Angeles Times reporter Elina Shatkin contributed to this story.