During the Great Depression, there was a surplus of molasses and the need to provide easily made food to millions of economically depressed people in the US.[7] One company patented a cake-bread mix in order to deal with this economic situation, and thereby established the first line of cake in a box. In so doing, cake as it is known today became a mass-produced good rather than a home- or bakery-made specialty.
Later, during the post-war boom, other American companies (notably General Mills) developed this idea further, marketing cake mix on the principle of convenience, especially to housewives. When sales dropped heavily in the 1950s, marketers discovered that the cake in a box rendered the cake-making function of housewives relatively dispiriting. This was a time when women, retired from the war-time labor force, and in a critical ideological period in American history, were confined to the domestic sphere and oriented towards the freshly blossoming consumerism in the US.[8] In order to compensate for this situation, the marketing psychologist Ernest Dichter ushered in the solution to the cake mix problem: frosting.[9] Deprived of the creativity involved in making their own cake, within consumerist culture[clarification needed], housewives and other in-home cake makers could compensate by cake decoration inspired by, among other things, photographs in magazines of elaborately decorated cakes.
Ever since, cake in a box has become a staple of supermarkets, and is complemented with frosting in a can.