Many companies close outdated hometown plants when they expand nationally, but not Flowers, which finished modernizing the Thomasville bakery, where 409 work, in 1999.
Tasty Baking has called Philadelphia home since it started business in 1914, and these days Tasty has a modern bakery, too. But that's just about where the similarities end.
Thomasville is pretty much nowhere, squatting near the border of the Florida Panhandle, and Philadelphia is the nation's fifth-largest city and part of the urban necklace that stretches from Washington to Boston.
From its out-of-the-way base, Flowers goods made at 39 bakeries sell throughout the southern half of the country all the way to California. Tasty Baking's failure to expand, along with the cost of its new facility at the Navy Yard and a failure to achieve cost efficiencies from the new bakery, forced Tasty to offer itself for sale.
Flowers was the buyer, and with a surging stock price and $2.6 billion in sales last year, spending $34.5 million, plus the assumption of debt, for Tastykakes was not a stretch.
The folks in Thomasville see nothing odd about this equation, nor do they believe sentiment has been the tie that has bound the town and the company.
"There's more to it than the historical" significance, said Mickey Miller, president of Flowers Baking Co. of Thomasville L.L.C., the local subsidiary. Flowers executives considered moving the bakery in 1995, but they decided it was not worth the trouble.
"Why pick up and move? You've got everything you need right here," said Miller, a 38-year Flowers veteran.
If a company can earn a halo in the eyes of its hometown residents, then Flowers wears one.
"I'm sure there have been a lot of pressures on them to relocate. We're not exactly in the middle of the U.S. or in the middle of their target market," said Steve Sykes Jr., Thomasville's city manager.
