Get a compelling long read and must-have lifestyle tips in your inbox every Sunday morning — great with coffee! A small demolition crew is slowly gutting the old Tastykake factory on Hunting Park Avenue for scrap. On this overcast morning in early March, the crew works beneath ceilings where peeling paint hangs like suspended confetti over what remains of the equipment that, for 88 years, baked countless Krimpets and Juniors, Kandy Kakes and Kreamies.
Bob Bolduc, a former Tasty Baking maintenance chief now dismantling the machines he once tended, thinks it is the shock of cold that has accelerated the decomposition. The bakery was a hours-a-day, six-days-a-week operation, and with the ovens roaring at degrees, it was always warm inside the Tastykake factory. But this winter, for the first time in nearly nine decades, the cold crept in and blistered the varnish right off the walls.
And so the bakery feels as though it was abandoned decades ago, the sense of forsakenness belied only by the faint but unmistakable sweet smell of cake that somehow still lingers in the air. For a company whose business model is utterly reliant on nostalgia, there was surprisingly little ceremony when Tasty Baking shut down its historic Nicetown plant in June By then, most of the operation had already moved nine miles due south into the new Tastykake plant at the Navy Yard.
Then, last June, the final two Nicetown production lines made the move south as well. And that was it. Tasty Baking had left the past behind. Now the company would churn out new products more easily and spend less on labor.
Since the new bakery was in a Keystone Opportunity Zone, Tasty Baking would save a bundle on taxes as well. Tasty Baking had no choice in the matter. The only other option was insolvency, a fate the company avoided in January only by the grace of a publicly funded bailout and the patience of its lenders.
Clearly, there was much more than jobs at stake. There was the fear of severing a link to powerful childhood memories. There was the sense that, if Tastykake disappeared, Philadelphia would somehow lose a bit of its own identity.
I feel I should confess something at this point: I do not much like Tastykakes. Perhaps more than any other local company, Tasty Baking is evocative of the Philadelphia condition. Just like the city it calls home, the company struggled to stay vital and relevant as manufacturing jobs dried up and the white working class moved out to the suburbs. The story of Tasty Baking — of its rise, its move to the Navy Yard and now its disappearance as a point of city pride — is a scale model of the way Philadelphia works.
Or, more accurately, how it too often does not. Baur and Herbert Morris stand as parochial versions of Ray Kroc and Henry Ford, innovators who not only introduced a new product, but also perfected the means to bake their cakes on a scale few others could match.
Baur was a baker from Pittsburgh, and Morris an egg salesman from Boston. Although Baur was the baker, it was Morris — the salesman — who was obsessed with freshness. As a marketing strategy, it was genius. Tasty products gained a reputation for quality that the company still trades on today.
And if it occasionally meant that stores sold out of Tasty products, well, that just helped prove to consumers how good and fresh the cakes must be. There were still plenty of families that ate Tastykakes every day, like the one that raised Charlie Pizzi. The son of a cement mason and a homemaker, Pizzi grew up with four sisters in a two-story rowhome with a gabled roof and a tiny front yard in the Overbrook section of West Philadelphia. Soon snackers found Tastykakes in the New York City area, as far west as Ohio, and, in an effort to catch the market of the growing number of snowbird retirees, south into Florida.
Further distribution contracts put the cakes onto shelves in forty-six states. But expansion and slow sales outside the Mid-Atlantic region also overextended the company, forcing it to refocus solely on the baking business. After a decade of unloading acquisitions, Tastykake expanded once again, in , but this time strictly aligned with its core business model, by purchasing a bakery in Oxford, Chester County, to expand into the production of doughnuts, breads, and honey buns.
Tastykake also responded to an increasingly global marketplace. By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, however, globalization had caught up with Tastykake. In the company moved its headquarters and major center of operation from the Hunting Park Avenue site to the Philadelphia Naval Business Center formerly the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard , where it helped to transform the military base into a modern-day business park.
It was the end of an era. The treats once available only in Philadelphia and regional stores by this time were available up and down the East Coast, all across the South and Southwest, as well as online for shipping anywhere. Tastykake remained iconic in the Philadelphia region and among those who grew up with the products and moved away, but the company changed over the years to meet the challenges of a changing society.
A native of Pennsylvania, he still has Tastykakes regularly shipped to him. Gardner, Joel. Philadelphia: Tasty Baking Company, Kaiser, Paul. Broad Street, Philadelphia. Love Tastykake products grew up on them. Have a question how much was a tastyklair in Thank you. I not knowing their history believed they were good enough that they did not need to expand their sales to the west coast.
They were the best ever. Dick Clark, Joe E. Brown, Shari Lewis and her puppets are a few others. So the company decided to shift gears and launch a few new products with adults in mind. The more grown-up menu included chocolate-covered pretzels, Danish pastries, muffins, and single-sized snacks.
Mike's Candy Wrappers. They bake , of them per day. Compare that to , Butterscotch Krimpets or , Chocolate Cupcakes. And yum!
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