Editorial
Front Page - Friday, September 24, 2010
Little Debbie Bakery Store provides variety of treats at sweet prices
Erica Tuggle
Linda and Eric Rodrigues fill their cart with low priced snack cakes and sweets that the Little Debbie Thrift Store No. 1 on Apison Pike in Collegedale. Linda says they make the trip all the way from Red Bank to stock up on the treats they love.
- Erica Tuggle
Entrepreneur O.D. McKee and his wife Ruth formed McKee Baking Company in 1934. Filling in the aspects the other partner was lacking in business, this team took a 5 cent cookie shop and turned it into a cake bakery that is now one of the largest names in snack cakes in the country. According to their Web site, McKee brings in $1.2 billion in sales annually from their Little Debbie, Fieldstone and Sunbelt products.
For more than 70 years, McKee has been a privately held, family owned, local business in Collegedale, Tenn., providing their treats at consistently low prices. At the three Little Debbie Bakery Stores in town, the prices are even sweeter on their treats so that locals and visitors can all enjoy McKee products.
Although their name changed in 1991 to the McKee Foods Corporation, the place where Little Debbies are born still resides in Collegedale. Not far from the secret construction site of the cakes, cookies and many other products that McKee now makes, there is Little Debbie Bakery Store on Apison Pike.
Linda and Eric Rodrigues make the trip to the Collegedale store all the way from Red Bank.
Linda says, “It’s reasonable [in price] and children love little sweets and you get a variety that you really don’t have in stores. So that’s why we make the extra trip to come.”
Eric Rodrigues says he makes the trip for his favorite Little Debbie product: which is to say, all of them.
Little Debbies became available in 1960. Since then, McKee has sold more than 157 billion of the snacks. The company was the first bakery to sell individually wrapped cakes in a multipack carton, and the tradition carries on to this day.
During that time, a carton of 12 cakes had a suggested retail price of 49 cents, and to buy the cakes separately would be 60 cents. Throughout the Bakery Store, the cartons of six, eight and 12 pack snacks are available as well as individual cakes and snack cakes by the box, which can include as many as 20 boxes of a chosen treat. All of these items are discounted more than store prices, and on certain days, there is extra savings, such as 20 percent off your purchase on the day this reporter was there.
For those who need a bit of sampling before they buy, the store has a bowl of loose cakes to try. The fall selections of Football Brownies, Fall Brownies and Pumpkin Delights are also available at the store. The Little Debbie cream-filled Christmas Tree Cakes and Cookie Wreaths are just around the corner as well for stocking stuffer ideas. Although the Little Debbie and Sunbelt selection is impressive, there is also the discounted bread at the bakery store. Fresh loaves of many different brands at low prices are available along with Little Debbie merchandise like lunchboxes, Marie Alexander Little Debbie dolls and the Little Debbie Cookbook.
McKee makes more than 160 varieties of Little Debbie multipak and single-serve snacks which are distributed to all 50 states, Canada, Puerto Rico, Mexico and U.S. military commissaries overseas. In their bakery stores, the variety and versatility of Little Debbie is truly on display. In addition to the snack cakes, there are 29 different snacks and granola cereals under the Sunbelt brand. The Fieldstone brand under McKee provides the selection with cookies, breakfast pastries and other sundry snacks.
In order to meet the demand of the Little Debbie loving public, in addition to the Collegedale factory, McKee has production facilities in Gentry, Ark., and Stuarts Draft, Va., where Little Debbie bakery stores are also located.
McKee is also conscious of the impact they have on the communities and the world in which they produce, and therefore recycle about 3,750 tons of cardboard; 10,000 gallons of used petroleum oil; and
101,700 wooden pallets annually. According to their Web site, they say they are “working every day to reduce our consumption of paper, water and power. At McKee Foods, responsibility is one of our Guiding Values that we live by every day.”
Another part of their Guiding Values is the family unity that McKee strives to maintain. They say the statistics show that family-owned businesses are more likely to succeed than any other kind of company. Some of the reasons they provide is that in a family-owned company, there is stability of leadership, consistency in ethics and values, familiarity with real people, family members that are more likely to pull together in tough times, family members that may be better agents for change and they have a higher sense of mission.
Other nearby Little Debbie Bakery Stores are off of Highway 153 in Hixson, Tenn. and Mouse Creek Road in Cleveland, Tenn.
For more information on Little Debbie products and bakery store locations, visit www.littledebbie.com.
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