Flowers Foods

30°50′11″N 83°58′42″W / 30.83639°N 83.97833°W / 30.83639; -83.97833

Flowers Foods, headquartered in Thomasville, Georgia, is a producer and marketer of packaged bakery foods in the United States. The company operates 44 bakeries across 19 states that produce a variety of products, including bread, buns, rolls, snack cakes, pastries, and tortillas. As of February 2013, Flowers Foods had grown to be the "second-largest baking company in the United States."

Flowers Foods owns several well-known bread and baked goods brands, including Nature's Own, Dave's Killer Bread, Canyon Bakehouse, Simple Mills, Wonder, Tastykake, Mrs. Freshley's, and more. The company continues to expand its market reach through acquisitions and by extending its existing territory.

Flowers Foods distributes its products through two main channels: Direct Store Delivery (DSD) and Warehouse. The DSD segment handles the regional distribution of products through a network of independent distributors. The DSD segment encompasses almost 6,000 independent distributor territories across the East, South, Southwest, West, and Northwest regions of the United States. Flowers' Warehouse segment manages the national distribution of frozen products, which are shipped directly to customers' warehouses throughout the continental United States.

In 1914, brothers William Howard and Joseph Hampton Flowers founded the Flowers Ice Cream Company in Thomasville, Georgia. Recognizing a growing local demand for fresh bread, they expanded their business and, in 1919, established the Flowers Baking Company. The morning after its launch, 500 loaves of "Flowers Quality Bread" were sold in Thomasville. At the time, the bakery was considered the most modern in Georgia and had the capacity to produce 30,000 loaves of bread per day. Throughout the 1920s, Flowers Baking Company distributed bread, rolls, and cakes by rail across southern Georgia and into parts of Alabama and Florida.

During this period, Howard managed the bakery while his brother Joseph oversaw the ice cream business. In 1929, the company made its first divestiture by selling its ice cream operations to Foremost Dairies. After the death of founder William Howard Flowers in 1934, his 20-year-old son, William Howard Flowers Jr., assumed leadership of the bakery.

The company made its first acquisition in 1937, purchasing Tally Maid Bakery of Tallahassee, Florida. With the onset of World War II, the Flowers bakery operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week to supply bread to U.S. military camps across the southeastern United States. In 1942, Flowers became the sixth bakery in the U.S. to franchise Quality Bakers of America's Sunbeam brand and use the Little Miss Sunbeam mascot on its bread wrappers.

During the 1960s, Flowers expanded by acquiring bakeries in Opelika, Alabama, and Panama City, Florida. In 1965, Flowers constructed a new bakery in Jacksonville, Florida. Two years later, the company entered the metropolitan Atlanta market by acquiring the Atlanta Baking Company.