Chattanooga Bakery celebrates 100 years of a singular treat
The first thing you notice when you bite into a MoonPie, made with the new recipe Chattanooga Bakery plans to start using later this year, is the taste of graham.
Gone will be the preservatives. Gone, the fructose sweetener. The ingredients will be items you could find in your kitchen cabinets, said Tory Johnston, Chattanooga Bakery’s vice president of marketing. This is also the recipe the bakery developed 100 years ago, the recipe it used for 70 years before the industry made a transition to baking with preservatives and fructose. Now with consumers seeking clean-eating options, the trend in the baking industry is to swing back to natural ingredients, Johnston said.
It was a cookie developed in 1917 for working-class Kentucky miners by a small regional bakery in Chattanooga. A hundred years later, it has grown in popularity and left fingerprints of melted chocolate across the South and its cuisine.
On this new and retro MoonPie, the chocolate coating glimmers dark on the mini MoonPie. The pillow of marshmallow in the middle was thicker, more substantial, a fact Johnston attributes to the company’s development of the marshmallow filling.
The graham cracker plays a bigger role in the s’more trio because pure sugar tastes cleaner, Johnston said. It’s subtle, Johnston said, but fructose is slightly bitter and that masks the taste of graham.
When the company tested the retro recipe, those who sampled “universally prefer the taste” of it, Johnston said.
Oddly enough, even though Chattanooga Bakery is stripping preservatives from its recipe, the shelf life of the product remains unchanged at 120 days.
“That’s the way the product naturally ages,” Johnston said. The chocolate encapsulating graham and marshmallow helps preserve the sandwich pie.
HOW IT ALL BEGAN
As Johnston tells it, the birth of the MoonPie began with a fateful conversation with a working-class man and the rest, as they say, is history. During the beginning years of the 20th century, Chattanooga Bakery cooked up dozens of cookie varieties under its Lookout brand in the northern part of Chattanooga’s southside, next to the railroad tracks on King Street. It was one of many regional bakeries across the nation whipping up its version of animal crackers, ginger snaps and oyster crackers. Business was not good, however.
Earl Mitchell, the sales manager for the company (which is the position Johnston fills today) was out on a sales call and a grocer in Kentucky had just told him that the products weren’t popular, weren’t selling.
Outside, Mitchell struck up a conversation with a group of miners. What did they like? Chocolate was good. Also, it had to be big. It was a long way down into the mines and there were no stores down there to buy something for a quick jolt of energy. One earth-bound miner looked to the sky, saw the freshly risen moon, and told Mitchel to make the pie as big as that, something hearty to fit into lunch boxes.
When Mitchell returned to Chattanooga, he saw one bakery worker eating lunch, dipping the company’s graham cracker into marshmallow. The MoonPie was born.
Today, MoonPie production is automated and faster. Old pictures of the Chattanooga Bakery line show literal lines of workers—many of them women—whose job was to assemble the cookies as they rode the conveyor, flipping tops and placing them on the bottoms covered in marshmallow.
In the 50s and 60s, when the MoonPie rode to a national prominence thanks to the rise of the supermarket, Chattanooga workers were still hand applying the cookies. It was during that time when Chattanooga Bakery switched to manufacturing only MoonPies.
Those tasks are now given to wrapping machines, depositors that put the marshmallow on the cookie, and packaging robots.
100 YEARS OF STORIES
The company is doing a lot for its 100-year anniversary, Johnston said. The first is commemorative packaging. The boxes will be the same color as the American flag, and a seal that’s grey with the words “One company, one family, one brand, countless happy memories.”
In essence, the Chattanooga Bakery operates a simple business. The fifth-generation, family-owned company made its fortune on the one kind of snack, one brand that capitalizes on retro-Americana, Johnston said. That’s the snack itself, and the licensing that comes with it. “We can’t mess this one up. We have nothing to fall back on,” Johnston said.
A display case at the entrance to the Chattanooga Bakery headquarters shows a sampling of MoonPie products: baseball caps, a MoonPie insulated can holder, two books on the history of MoonPies. For $40, you too can own a MoonPie tie.
In addition to commemorative packaging, Chattanooga Bakery will issue a series of collectable items for its centennial, like a handful of collectable tins, in retro packaging, that will retail for about $10. The company partnered with model train manufacturer Lionel to create a MoonPie boxcar.
On the kickoff weekend of the Chattanooga Market April 29 and 30, Chattanooga Bakery will celebrate the 100-year anniversary of the MoonPie, a birthday party if you will. But the most public event MoonPie will do is hold a MoonPie Memories contest for people to tell the best MoonPie story.
There will be tough competition.
Every year, the company receives about 200 requests to provide MoonPies for people’s weddings, such as a MoonPie grooms cake, or favors for the guests.
“Because when you say ‘MoonPie,’ typically two things happen,” Johnston said. “First thing, is you get a smile and secondly, you get a story.”
And the grand prize for such a yarn? The winner will receive a 100-year supply of the snack—quite the story itself.
SNACK OF THE SOUTH
David Magee—who wrote the book on MoonPies—is a self-admitted MoonPie addict. He says so himself in his book: “MoonPie: Biography of an Out-of-This-World Snack.” The former columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press now works as publisher of The Oxford Eagle in Mississippi. He wrote several business books, books on Nissan Toyota, but his book about the MoonPie is his favorite.
He has memories of eating MoonPies with his grandfather at an old-time country story and reaching for the snack to fuel trips to various Mississippi fishing holes while he was a teenager. These days, the mini banana MoonPies sing a particularly strong siren song for Magee. “They’re good in moderation,” he said.
And while the cookie has an emotional connection for many people, it’s more than that, Magee said. “This little snack tells so much about the emerging South.”
There are not as many mining jobs these days. However, “The working-class American had a lot to do with the MoonPie in every level,” Magee said.
It was first eaten by lower-to-middle class southerners. As they grew in wealth, the cookie followed them. When millions of black southerners moved north to escape Jim Crowism and to find work in places like Detroit, “The MoonPie went along for the ride,” Magee said.
When American workers turned to vending machines for the source of their snacking in the 60s and 70s, Chattanooga Bakery developed the Double-Decker MoonPie to fit vending machines in 1964. Walmart, which started stocking MoonPies, helped bring the snack national.
Magee, a former business writer, sees several business lessons from the 100-years of MoonPies. Number one? “Be good at something,” he said. Specialize. Many people can be jack of all trades. Fewer can be the master of one. The second lesson he sees is patience.
“We want to make the new MoonPie overnight,” Magee said. Instead, that development, refinement and brand recognition takes time to establish. The third lesson is a lesson in family ownership and the quality that it brings. The MoonPie wouldn’t have the same nostalgia if the Campbell family sold the snack to a larger baking company, or an investment company, Magee said.
Over the years, the Campbell family has made the MoonPie line something unique. There’s only one factory that makes MoonPie, Magee said, and over the years the Campbell family has custom built its own factory equipment, mechanisms that are only found in Chattanooga, Tennessee. For example, the way the factory flips the cookies on the marshmallow-top cookie.
SIMPLER TIMES OF THE MOONPIE
Today, two groups primarily buy MoonPies, Johnston said. The first is families with kids—Mothers buying up snacks and desserts for her kids ages 6 to 16. The second is men 35 to 54.
The demographics buy different packaging. The mom, boxes. When mothers buy the snack, she’s thinking of picking up some kind of sweet baked good. The man, he’s more likely to dig into his pocket for a dollar or two to buy a MoonPie at a convenience store. They’re individually wrapped, and he’s most likely a southern, working-class male who is convinced to buy because of the MoonPie’s double-dose of value and nostalgia.
MoonPies, Johnston said, are impulse buys. “We don’t make the shopping list,” he said. Price and availability are everything in this business. The local Food City, for example, sells a Double Decker MoonPie, with a hefty 300 calories for a mere 50 cents.
When it comes to taste, MoonPie’s flavor profile—s’mores—“is just red hot,” Johnston said. For example, last August, the Girl Scouts of the United States of America announced it was adding the Girl Scout S’more cookie to its 2017 lineup of Tagalongs, Thin Mints and Samoas. According to the announcement, the Girl Scouts published the recipe for the campfire treat in 1925—one of the first to do so.
“We unofficially call ourselves the original s’more,” Johnston said. At least, he said, MoonPies are the first mass produced s’more-flavored snack.
But why do MoonPies matter today? “I think simpler times really matter,” Johnston said, adding this world comes at you fast, is “over-programmed” and overwhelms with its complexity. Looking back 20, 30 years ago, “there was a lot right, the way things were then,” Johnston said.
In the future, the brand has to stay true to who it is, Johnston said. It can’t veer into the cute. Since the 50s and 60s, Chattanooga Bakery was never as big as the “huge cookie conglomerates,” Johnston said. There was always bigger fish in the pond. Eventually, power brands emerged but Chattanooga Bakery persists as a “challenger brand,” Johnston said.
Currently, the Chattanooga Bakery is doing well. 2016 was the best year in the company’s history, Johnston said. There are a lot of things going for it: the name, the quality, the taste profile and the story. Among those things, nostalgia is a powerful motivator.
Over the past few years, MoonPie has tried out variations: Different packaging, different flavors, different cookies types. Even mini MoonPies are only 15 years old. Recently, Chattanooga Bakery collaborated with North Star Frozen Treats to make a MoonPie ice cream sandwich.
“We’re going to stay close to the core. People have a pretty literal understanding to what a MoonPie is. We can’t stray too far.”For Johnston, MoonPies is a southern, unassuming brand which has stood the test of time. “It’s just so simple, it’s endured,” he said.