In the beginning, Sister Schubert's Homemade Rolls really were homemade — in my home. I went to Sears and bought the largest double residential oven they had. It was too big to fit in my kitchen, so I set it up on the sun porch. My mother gave me a chest freezer as a gift, which we placed next to the oven. We made the dough in my little Sunbeam mixer and cut out the rolls by hand. The sun porch became a mini-bakery, complete with a plastic flap door to keep the humidity and heat in the room correctly balanced. Our dining room table served as a cooling and packaging area.
With help from my daughters Charlotte and Chrissie, other enthusiastic family members and three coworkers, I began my little business. It was very hard work at first, but immensely satisfying.
My first attempt at marketing my rolls was to visit the local grocery stores in Troy. Nobody seemed very interested until Mrs. Ingram of Ingram's Curb Market tried my rolls and ordered a dozen pans. Charlotte, Chrissie and I went to Ingram's and passed out samples. After just a month, we were delivering 120 pans of rolls to Ingram's each week, and I started looking for new markets.
At first, I called on other small groceries in Montgomery, Dothan, and Birmingham, Alabama. If a grocer would agree to sell my rolls, then the girls and I would set up in the store and hand out samples. I knew that if I could get people to taste my rolls, they would buy them.
The Business Is on a Roll!After operating out of my home for almost a year, I decided to take a giant step by setting up a commercial bakery. I found a wholesale supplier for ingredients and packaging and bought some used commercial ovens and a little 20-quart commercial mixer. I say little now, but it looked like a monster to me the first time I saw it. My father had a furniture warehouse in downtown Troy, and we set up our bakery in 1,000 square feet there. Within six months, we had to evict the furniture and take over the whole warehouse.
It didn't take long before I could no longer call on new markets, supervise production and manage delivery all by myself. I turned to Mr. George Barnes, a food broker. He expanded our distribution from a few local groceries to major grocery chains throughout the South. He became the other half of the Sister Schubert management team, and my own better half when we were married in 1995.
People kept talking about our rolls, and pretty soon orders were outpacing production at our little bakery. In 1994, we opened a new, state-of-the-art facility in Luverne, Alabama. It was a huge risk, but it was an affirmation of my faith and my vision for the company. With 25,000 square feet, I thought the Luverne bakery provided all the space we needed. But by 1998 we had completed two expansions and were making more than 1 million rolls a day.
By that time, my rolls had attracted the attention of really big corporations, who approached me about buying the company. I wasn't interested at first, but eventually we were enticed to sell our stock to Lancaster Colony Corp., a specialty foods company based in Columbus, Ohio. We did it for two reasons. First, they had all the resources to propel Sister Schubert to a national brand. But more importantly, they had a history of purchasing family-run companies and then keeping the families on board to run the company.
