image © Tasty Kake
Tasty Baking, 1922
2801 Hunting Park Avenue, Philadelphia PA
© Harold E. Spaulding,
Workshop of the World (Oliver Evans Press, 1990).
The Tasty Baking Company was
formed in 1914 when Philip J. Bauer, a Pittsburgh baker,
and Herbert C. Morris, a Boston egg salesman, conceived
the idea of sanitary-wrapped cakes. Bauer supplied the
recipe and baking skills, and Morris supplied the name
Tasty Kake and sales ability. They each also supplied
$25,000 in start-up capital.
The company set up its operations in Philadelphia, on
Sedgely Avenue, near 24th Street, and their first sales
were concentrated in Germantown. By the end of the first
year, their profits were $300,000. Four years later, they
introduced a radical sales scheme called “the
controlled distribution plan,” which allowed
customers to buy only what they could sell in a given
amount of time, in order to avoid staleness problems. The
program was a dramatic success and profits continued to
climb. In 1922, they moved their operations to Hunting
Park Avenue and within the next eight years had expanded
their plant five-fold. 1
image © Tasty
Kake
In 1952, the company’s controlled distribution
policies were liberalized when surveys done in stores
showed that Tasty Kakes were generating extremely high
profits per linear foot of selling space. In the 1960s,
the company began to diversify its holdings and moved
into graphic arts and other nonrelated fields. At
present, food production provides only 50% of the
company's income. 2
1 Paul R. Kaiser,
"Tasty
Kake—A Record of Quality," (Newcomen Society in
North America, 1978), p. 11.
2 Tasty Baking Company
Annual Report, 1988; also "Notice of Annual Meeting of
Shareholders," April 21, 1989.
Update May 2007 (by Muriel
Kirkpatrick):
In 1996 Tasty Baking bought a Keebler plant in Oxford,
Pennsylvaina, and equipped it to produce yeast-raised
baked goods. It expanded its products to include
breakfast items like Danish and bear claws, packaging
these items in bulk for corporate clients and
institutions. The company planned to invest in its
500,000-square-foot plant on Hunting Park to boost
capacity by 50 percent (Philadelphia Business Journal,
September 11, 1998). Tasty Baking gave an option to a
redeveloper on twelve acres of land at the Nicetown site,
which did not include its baking facility, for the
proposed Trump casino. The company earned money even
though the Pennsylvania Gaming Board did not approve this
as a gaming site, and plans for the sale were withdrawn.
(Philadelphia Business Journal, December 29, 2006).
The eighty-five-year-old facility is inefficient, as raw
materials need to be moved to the top of the six-story
building, with operations continuing throughout the
structure until finished products are removed at the
ground floor. The company would like to build a facility
that would be open to tour groups and prefers to stay in
Philadelphia, where it has approximately 500 employees
(Philadelphia Inquirer, February 23, 2007).
On May 9, 2007, Tasty Baking Co. announced it would move
by 2009 into five new buildings to be constructed at the
Philadelphia Navy Yard. Corporate headquarters will be
near the entrance on South Broad Street. The new
350,000-square-foot bakery will be on 25 acres near the
26nd Street entrance and what was the former navy brig.
The new production operations will reduce the number of
lines from 15 to 7, resulting in the loss of 215 jobs.
See
also:
Tasty Kake - corporate
website