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Here to tell the story of Little Debbie is Simon Whistler. From the Today I Found Out YouTube channel. And its sister, The Brain Food Show podcast. Let's take a listen. No.
It was 1933 and the United States was in the throes of the Great Depression. Nearly a quarter of the nation was unemployed and breadlines went on for blocks. In short, many were desperate, including O.D. and Ruth McKee, who had lost most of their money due to a bank failure. What the couple did still have, however, was a 1928 Whippet car.
According to McKee Food's official history, this is when Odie started selling five cents Virginia Dare cakes made by Becker's Bakery out of the back of said vehicle. By the next year, business was good enough that they were able to purchase a Chattanooga, Tennessee bakery, Jack's Cookie Company. In what was a unique arrangement for the time, Ruth became a full managing partner in the business with her husband. While Odie traveled the state making sales and coming up with some innovative ways to produce new product, she baked, managed the office, and took charge of the few employees that they had. They were, as the company's official history put it, ideal business partners because her cautious, conservative nature was the perfect complement to his risk-taking, adventuresome spirit.
Okay. Years later, Jack McKee would explain that his parents had a unique opportunity during the Great Depression and they took a risk. A few months later, the vet seemed to be paying off with the bakery moving to a larger location down the street. But all wasn't perfect. In 1934, they took on Ruth's father, Simon King, as a partner.
It's not clear why they did it. Perhaps they needed an infusion of capital, or maybe they trusted King's business instincts. Either way, it doesn't appear to have been a match made in Cake Heaven. In 1936, over a business disagreement, the company split, with the couple selling their share and moving to Charlotte, North Carolina, to found a new bakery, while King took over the Tennessee shop, which he renamed King's Bakery. McKee's official history leaves a giant gap between 1936 and 1952.
However, it seems that each bakery operated with moderate success, though with little known about them other than that it was during this period that Odie invented what is known today as the company's oldest continuously sold product, the oatmeal cream pie. Oatmeal Cream Pie, the original OCP. It first hit the shelves in 1960, see? Two oatmeal cookies layered with cream.
So unwrap a smile and taste the dream. Wanna guess how many we make? It sure is a lot, because today we bake. By the mid-20th century, O.D. and his wife decided to sell their bakery and reportedly mulled over retiring, but at the request of Ruth's brother Cecil, who at this point was running King's Bakery, returned to help out managing it.
Rather than run someone else's company for them not long after, OD and Ruth decided to buy the bakery back and rename it McKee Baking Company. The company quickly flourished under their management, which included the then innovative idea to sell their product in family packs, individually wrapped baked goods, which were sold as a package deal. Specifically, in the late 1950s, McKee Foods began producing family packs of 12 individually wrapped cakes in one unit. Thanks to essentially selling them in bulk to customers, it allowed the company to drop the price per unit slightly while enjoying a significant boost in product sales at the same time. According to Jack McKee, one of the couple's sons, most other snack companies didn't begin packaging items this way for another decade or two.
Yeah. This all brings us to how a straw hat-clad smiling girl named Debbie ended up on the front of the boxes of mini treats. There are slightly conflicting stories on how Odie came up with the idea to use little Debbie, but the general tale goes that a packaging salesman, Bob Mosher, told Odie that the McKee name was boring and that he needed something better to juice sales. Casting out, Odie supposedly noticed a picture of his granddaughter, Debbie, daughter of his son Ellsworth, and daughter-in-law Sharon McKee on his desk, and a light bulb went off in his head. Still wanting to use a family name, Odie decided on naming the company's new line after Debbie and to use the picture on his desk of her in a straw hat as a logo.
Whether that's exactly how he came up with the idea or not, we do know definitively that he had said picture in his office and that after inspiration struck, he didn't tell Debbie's parents before going through with the final printing. Not long after, famed pin-up artist Pearl Frush Mann used the picture of Odie's desk to create a coloured rendition of the little girl that still graces the boxes to this day.
Okay. McKee Foods is still family owned by second and third generation McKees. At our family bakeries, it takes a big, talented team to bake all of these snacks. My grandfather, O.D. McKeed, believed in innovation and automation.
He was the Henry Ford of Snackcakes. While not an engineer by trade, he spent countless hours inventing ways to make the lines run more efficiently. My dad, Jack McKee, joined the company as an engineer in the 60s. I followed in his footsteps and became an engineer too. Today that innovative philosophy continues and we're doing things that granddad would have never imagined.
I've been working at the Key Foods or the Bakery, as we like to call it, since I was 16 and done basically a lot of different jobs around the company. I love what we do. I mean, selling little Debbie's, selling Sunbelt Bakery, what could be more fun? We have about 6,000 employees nationwide, and here in the Chattanooga area, we got about 3,500 employees. And we just want to treat our employees like family.
As for Little Debbie Debbie McKee Fowler, she's now all grown up and is the current executive vice president of the company and runs the Little Debbie brands. As a founder of the Little Debbie Bakery, Ruth McKee was a groundbreaking businesswoman. She was a working mom, and she encouraged education for employees to advance and grow. Ruth McKee was a role model for women in leadership. She was my role model.
She was also my Grammy. I'm Debbie McKee Fowler. Today I'm Chairman of the Board. But you know me as. Yeah.
While other snack cake companies may be struggling, McKee Foods keeps thriving. In 2015, they announced an over $100 million investment in their Collegedale factory. In addition, they recently acquired Drake's Cakes, who make devil dogs and yodels, for $27.5 million from the bankrupt hostess. And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler. And a special thanks to Simon Whistler.
from the Today I Found Out YouTube channel. And its sister, the Brain Food Show Podcast. Check both of them out. They have terrific and regularly great content. And what a story we heard.
Little Debbie. is now the chairman of the board of McKee Foods. The story of Little Debbie. Here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here again, and I'd like to encourage you to subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, Or wherever you get your podcasts.
Every story we air here is uploaded there daily, and your support goes a long way to keeping the great stories you love from this show. Coming. Again, please subscribe to the Our American Stories podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. You don't want vacation to end, but with Amex Platinum, you earn five times membership rewards points on prepaid hotels and more booked through amextravel.com.
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