Flowers Foods, Tasty Baking Co.'s new owners, has long connection to Georgia town

THOMASVILLE, Ga. - A couple of blocks from the brick-paved and thriving shopping district in this southwest Georgia town, Flowers Foods Inc. - the soon-to-be owner of Philadelphia's Tasty Baking Co. - still operates a bakery on the site where the company opened it in 1919.

The bakery, expanded so often the original structure has been lost in the changes, is a most-tangible symbol of Flowers' attachment to this town of 18,413, which flourished as a resort in the late 1800s, when rail lines from the North ended here. It still draws the wealthy to hunt quail on plantations that cover 300,000 acres southwest toward Tallahassee, Fla.

Many companies close outdated hometown plants when they expand nationally, but not Flowers, which finished modernizing the Thomasville bakery, where 409 work, in 1999.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.

"They're good to the community, good to everybody," said Steven Harrison, a Thomasville native who hopes to land a job at Flowers after finishing college.

The two-block central shopping district is lined with small businesses, such as Jergens Jewellers, Grassroots Coffee, and Thomas Drug Store, established in 1881. But no bars. When bars open, they fail, residents said. It is either the Bible Belt mentality or bad management that dooms them, Harrison said.

Flowers is an important employer in Thomasville, but not the biggest. That distinction belongs to the John D. Archbold Hospital, which was named for one of the northern business magnates whose families were drawn to the "piney air" of southern Georgia in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

That era still defines the town, with historic winter residences, dubbed "cottages," lining certain older residential streets. Justus C. Strawbridge, cofounder of Philadelphia's Strawbridge & Clothier department store, added his, a colonial revival mansion, to the mix in 1899.

To the south and southeast of town during the same era, industrialists, such as beneficiaries of the Ford and Rockefeller empires, as well as founders of Maybelline cosmetics, bought plantations that had fallen on hard times in the post-Civil-War era and made them hunting retreats. It was cheaper than staying in a hotel, said Ann R. Harrison, executive director of the Thomas County Historical Society.

Between Thomasville and Tallahassee, 37 miles apart, there are still about 70 plantations, all but one in private hands, according to Thomasville officials. Today, the wealthy and their sometimes famous friends fly into Thomasville's airport to hunt deer, quail, and turkey in pine forests. Last week one could smell smoke from controlled burns used to improve wildlife habitat.

"When your airplane lands, we'll roll out the red carpet, but our guys are trained," said Sykes, the city manager. "What they see out there, stays out there."

The Flowers family, whose own hunting plantation - called Merrily - is south of town, came to Thomasville in 1909 from Alabama, where it had been in the timber business. Ten years later, William H. Flowers and his brother, Joseph H. Flowers, started the bread bakery that still bears their name.

Flowers Foods began early with acquisitions as a key part of its strategy, making its first in 1937. That was three years after William H. Flowers Jr. had taken over the business, when he was 20, after his father died.

Bill Flowers, as he was called, led the company for 50 years, much of that time with the help of his younger brother, Langdon. Bill died in 2000; Langdon died in 2007.

Among the Thomasville residents with fond memories of the Flowers brothers is Allen Parker, who said he has had a barbershop in town for 39 years and cut the brothers' hair for many years.

Asked why he thought the Flowers company had been so successful, Parker said: "Good people, is one thing. They were hard workers, too."

Today, no members of the Flowers family are involved in the day-to-day management of the company, whose headquarters on 50 acres just outside of town is a replica of an 18th-century Williamsburg-style mansion, including a front doorknob low to the ground, because people were shorter then.

Two Flowers in-laws are on the board of the publicly traded company, whose stock has gained an average of 23 percent annually over the last 10 years, far outpacing food-industry competitors.

In town, the Flowers family members are active in community efforts, townspeople said. Peggy Rich, for example, a daughter of Langdon Flowers, is president of the historical society. On Thursday, she was helping prepare one of the town's historic houses for a weekend event.

At the Flowers bakery in town, workers are confident.

Jerry McCuller, a roll mixer who has worked at Flowers for five years, is glad he never sees the executives he works for on television asking for government help. "Flowers is a good company, a strong one," McCuller said.