Mother’s Cookies is a company that originally had a bakery based in Oakland, California, which operated between 1914 and 2008. A sister company, Archway Cookies of Battle Creek, Michigan, was founded in 1936.
Mother’s is known for its’ pink and white iced “Circus Animal Cookies” and some other items that are tasty but do not hold a candle to their circus animal cookies. At its height, the company distributed cookies throughout the United States and was one of the leading cookie makers in the country.
According to Wikipedia, Archway was founded in 1936 by the Swansons, who were a husband-and-wife team who baked soft-batch cookies out in their garage. (Don’t knock it. Many companies started that way.) The Swansons went on to expand their company nationwide in the 1940s, changing its name to Archway to avoid conflict with Swanson, a maker of delicious frozen dinners. In 1962 the founders sold their company to their vice president, George Markham, who bought most of the franchises back over the next several years. George Markham in turn sold the company to two of his employees, who operated it from 1983 to 1998. The company was sold to Specialty Foods in 1998, reportedly for $100 million. That’s a lot of dough! (See what I did there?) The transaction made Specialty Foods the third largest cookie maker in the United States behind Keebler, with their cute little elves, and Nabisco.
The two companies then went through a succession of owners. Specialty Foods sold Mother’s and Archway to an Italian firm, Parmalat Finanziaria in 2000 for $250 million. In 2002, Mother’s was baking 17.5 million cookies per day. Parmalat filed for bankruptcy thanks in part to a scandal involving illegal sale of corporate bonds. Parmalat in turn sold the companies to Catterton Partners, a private equity firm in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 2005 and turned around and closed the Oakland factory in 2006 and laid off all 230 workers. They moved baking operations to Ohio and Canada. The company suffered an accounting scandal in 2008 and in October 2008, the company became a victim of the financial crisis of 2007–2010 when the company filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy and laid off all of its workers. This was a sad day as news quickly spread that the circus animal cookies would no longer be made as the recipe was held as a secret. Oh sure, there are imitations but nothing beats Mother’s.
Good news came a few months later in December 2008 when Lance Inc. bought the assets of Archway, and soon reopened the former Archway factory in Ashland, Ohio. Also, the same month Kelloggs was approved to buy the assets including the trademarks and recipes of Mother’s Cookies with plans to return the products to the shelves in mid-2009. On May 14 2009, Mother’s Cookies returned to store shelves, including Kellogg’s launch of a website for the product. Oh happy days! Talk about smiles all around. I was smiling bigger than a big top that day!
Have you ever had Mother’s Circus Animal Cookies? Which do you prefer? The pink or the white? Click here to leave a comment and share your opinion and experience. Would love to hear from you.
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