Collin Street Bakery
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The Collin Street Bakery is a bakery in Corsicana, Texas most famous for its DeLuxe Fruitcakes, which it ships to more than 150 nations annually.
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[edit] Early history
The bakery was founded in 1896 by August Wiederman, an immigrant from Wiesbaden, Germany. With the help of local entrepreneur Tom McElwee, the bakery soon outgrew its original building, and required a new one of such size that the second floor was turned into a hotel. Celebrities such as Enrico Caruso and Will Rogers were sighted at the bakery, and in 1914 the Ringling Brothers Circus passed through town and ordered dozens of fruitcakes as Christmas gifts to be mailed to friends and family across the globe. In this way, the bakery entered the mail-order business.
Wiederman died in 1947, having survived McElwee by a year.
Lee William McNutt and Robert Rutherford purchased the bakery in 1946. The privately held McNutt-Rutherford partnership still runs the company today.
[edit] Mail order sales
McNutt's son, L.W. McNutt Jr., joined the family business in 1958 and shifted the company's focus to mail order sales.
Initially, employees copied names and addresses of prospective customers from phone books collected from throughout the United States. The younger McNutt also initiated a direct market campaign to international customers. Under his direction, the company began accepting orders by telephone and later by fax and online. He also pioneered the use of a computerized customer database and mailing list and fine-tuned shipping methods to make delivery of the fruitcakes more efficient.
Today the Collin Street Bakery ships to 196 countries.
[edit] Notable clients
Descendants of the Ringling circus family continue to place orders each year. Monaco's Princess Grace also placed an annual fruitcake order, a tradition that Princess Caroline continued after her mother's death.
Basketball star Julius Erving is also a regular customer.
The company rejected an order from Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini following the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis.
[edit] Statistics
Fruitcake accounts for 98 percent of the bakery's total sales. The company sells about 3 million pounds of fruitcake each year, which equates to 1.5 million individual cakes.
The majority of orders are placed by mail and during a three-month period, October through November.
Despite the heavy demand, the bakery does not have a distributor, but sells its branded goods only at its Corsicana store and through mail-order. In the past some specialty Supermarkets, such as the defunct Amarraca in Pittsburgh's North Hills, have sold a private label version of the fruitcake.
[edit] External links
- Collin Street Bakery, Corsicana from the Handbook of Texas Online
