NEW YORK — Inside a Walmart store in New Jersey, a worker puts the finishing touches on a cake with an edible ink Sponge Bob on top. A colleague creates a buttercream rosette border for a different cake, while another co-worker frosts a tier of what will be a triple-deck dessert.

It’s graduation season, the busiest time of year for the 6,200 employees at the nation’s largest retailer trained to hand-decorate cakes per customers’ orders. The cakes themselves come pre-made, frozen and in a variety of shapes and sizes, from suppliers, not Walmart’s in-store bakeries.

But there’s no sugar-coating the importance the company places on its custom cake business. Its army of icing artisans are the highest paid hourly workers in a typical U.S. Walmart, excluding managers. Cake decorators earn an average of $19.25 per hour, compared with $18.25 for all nonmanagerial store workers, a spokesperson said.

Melissa Fernandez, 36, started working in electronics and then the wireless services department of the Walmart in North Bergen, New Jersey, before she transferred to the deli area in search of better pay.

But Fernandez had her eye on a cake decorating job, and after spending two months getting trained by a store colleague, she picked up a piping bag full time in 2021.

“I love baking at home. I love painting,” Fernandez said. “I love doing anything artistic, and I just always wanted to be a part of it.” After 11 years with Walmart, she said she now makes about $24.40 an hour.

Despite their elite status within Walmart, the retailer’s cake decorators have attracted detractors on social media.

The company promotes its personalized baked goods on TikTok, and the workers behind such creations do the same with their own profiles. As the content has grown in popularity, critics have accused Walmart decorators of stealing ideas and undercutting the work of professional cake artists with their low-priced products.

After TikTok videos praising Walmart’s $25 heart-shaped cakes with borders that resemble vintage lace cropped up before Valentine’s Day this year, a few bakers produced their own videos explaining why their cakes cost so much more and critiquing Walmart’s.

Debates ensued in the comments sections over whether Walmart represented evils of capitalism or served the needs of the masses.

A customized sheet cake that can be sliced to serve 96 people costs $59 at Walmart, one-third to half the price that a nationwide sample of independent bakeries list online for similarly sized cakes.

The slice of the celebratory occasion cake market that Walmart holds appears vast based on company-supplied figures. One out of four cakes sold in the U.S. comes from Walmart, and its employees will collectively decorate more than 1 million cakes during May and June, according to a company spokesperson.

Jazzing up a cake by hand requires skill, whether or not someone else did the baking, Fernandez said. Funneling buttercream frosting through a bag and various sized piping tips to yield the desired design without misplaced blobs is not the same as drawing or painting, she explained.

“There’s a lot of pressure points that you have to practice in order to get the borders correct and the right thickness or the right texture,” she said.