Shipping cake to ROR for reception

Hello all,

I am hoping someone on the forum may have information for me on the legalities/complications/options available for shipping food (specifically cake) to the Riu Ocho Rios for my reception.

My FH's family includes several people that suffer from celiac. Basically, they can't eat any products that contain gluten, a protein found in wheat. Naturally this makes their food selections rather slim in general, but when it comes to something like cake, they are even more limited.

I have the cake included in my reception package, but I was hoping to have another cake at the reception that is gluten free for them to enjoy as well. I had hoped to find a local bakery in Ocho Rios that may be able to accomodate a gluten free cake, but have been unsuccessful so far. The other option was to have a bakery in the states that we have used before send a cake to the ROR to arrive on the day of the reception, but I am not sure if that is allowed, or what shipping food into Jamaica entails.

Has anyone shipped their cake to ROR for their reception before? Any advice/thoughts/words of wisdom are appreciated.

Thanks!

Kristin

Have you considered maybe just bringing down a small cake with you instead? Im not sure how I feel about shipping the cake only because of customs requirements, costs, etc. It may just be cheaper to do it that way, and then have the resort keep it in the kitchen.

You may not be able to carry food into the country. I know when I went to Mexico last year I had a bag of chips from the plane. Customs agents were walking around the airport in Cancun with dogs, sniffing people's luggage for drugs/food. They made me throw my chips away before I could go through customs. I am not sure if Jamaica would be the same... Definitely check into it.

There was a past ROR bride whose mother made the cake before hand & brought it with her to the resort & assembled it on the day of. I can't for the life of me remember who it was or how she stored it, but I know that lots of us were pretty amazed that her mother was able to do that.

I agree with Monique & wouldn't chance shipping a cake myself. Anything could happen & the last thing you'd want is to not have the cake on the day of your wedding.

Take some time to read some past reviews of ROR weddings & see if you can find the review that I'm talking about. Maybe it will shed some light on how you can go about bringing the cake yourself. Maybe some local bakeries can tell you how this would work if you chose to do it that way.

Thanks for the thread link!

One of the problems is that we are heading down there on July 1st, but the wedding itself isn't until July 6th, so we wouldn't be able to bring it down with us (which believe me I had contemplated).

Does anyone know of any local bakers in the area? There was a link to a woman on one of the threads I found, but my e-mail got bounced back from yahoo saying there was no account by that address.