Food Production

To get your monsters fed most efficiently, it is important to understand that the cost per food does not change per item (it is always 10 coin per food). Thus, the true factor to consider is the rate at which food can be baked.

Here is a time analysis of food production

Cake Wins -- or does it?
With 173.61 units of food being produced per minute, it would appear baking a cake is the best way to go (if you can hold off and save 5,000,000 coins!).

However this assumes you already have the cash at hand and only a single bakery.

Note a few things:

1) Multiple bakeries can achieve the same or greater rate of production with "lower" treats compared to a single bakery, with the possible "cost" of higher maintenance. The limit to the number of bakeries per island also limits the potential of rate gain (so no 100,000 cupcakes).

2) At early stages of the game, the biggest limiting factor is the rate at which money is earned. Waiting to save 5 million coins is not worth the time saved in rate of food production, because you could have been making food the entire time. It also ignores the increased coin production that could be gained by intermittently leveling up monsters during this period.

3) The most effective rate of food production is achieved by minimizing the amount of time that any bakery sits idle. Of course, at "lower" levels of food production, this would require maintaining the bakeries around the clock, which is hard to sustain.

4) Balancing the factors, the most efficient strategy is roughly as follows:

At any time, decide how much money you have to spend on treats. Divide that money among all bakeries available and bake the "highest" (no jokes intended) treat you can in each of them. As each bakery finishes, continue to cycle the highest level treats you can, considering any bakeries that may finish in the next hour or so. The last bakery run before going to bed, however, should probably be an item that runs "overnight", such as a pizza.