Tastykake is a line of snack foods manufactured by the Tasty Baking Company, headquartered at the Philadelphia Navy Yard (formerly the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Established in 1914 by Philip J. Baur and Herbert T. Morris and originally selling its product only in the Philadelphia metropolitan area, the company now distributes its products in several states on the East Coast, including Florida, and has been gradually expanding across the United States.
In April 2010, Tasty Baking entered into a purchase-and-sale agreement with John Padgett
Associates and its guarantor, Metro Development Company, for the sale of its Philadelphia bakery property located at Hunting Park Avenue, and its former corporate offices and distribution center located at Fox Street, for $6 million.
Products
Tastykake produces a variety of pastries including cupcakes, donuts, honey buns, and pies.
History
Philip J. Baur and Herbert T. Morris founded the company, in the Germantown neighborhood along Sedgley Avenue, with an initial investment of $50,000, equal to $ today. First, Baur and Morris had opened a bakery in the Pittsburgh area, selling it to the Ward Baking Company in 1913. When Baur and Morris sold to Ward, the terms of the sale prohibited them from opening another bakery within 100 miles of Pittsburgh, so the partners looked instead to Philadelphia. In November 1913 they settled on the Sedgley Avenue location. Morris's wife came up with the Tastykake name. A Boston student created the Tastykake girl and logo. Led by Reverend Leon Sullivan, the group believed it was important that the public be conditioned to seeing African Americans doing more than menial jobs in the community. first on the market in 1931, later became Kandy Kakes, the most popular cakes in the company's history, with nearly half a million baked and packaged each day.
Financials
The Tasty Baking Company went public on the NYSE in 1961 under the ticker symbol TBC. On October 21, 2005, the company transitioned to the NASDAQ National Market and changed their ticker symbol to TSTY. The company's stock was removed from trading at the close of business on May 24, 2011, upon completion of its acquisition by Flowers Foods, and its ticker symbol retired.
thumb|A Tastykake delivery van on [[Chestnut Street (Philadelphia)|Chestnut Street.]]
The price of Tastykake stock collapsed in early 2011, falling from a closing price of $6.43 on January 4, closing at $4.05 the next day. This decline, of about one-third the share price, was accompanied by a spike in trading (from about 5,000 shares on January 4, to almost 1,000,000 the next day). This move came after a 7.4% drop in company sales during the preceding quarter of 2010. The next week, speculation in financial circles indicated Tastykake had failed to realize the projected savings of moving to the new factory.
On April 11, 2011, media reports indicated Tastykake's leadership agreed to sell the company to Flowers Foods, of Thomasville, Georgia, for $34 million in cash, or about $4 per share. (Tastykake stock closed at $1.61 per share at the end of the previous trading day.) The sale to Flowers Foods was good news to Pennsylvania taxpayers, because Tastykake borrowed approximately $80 million to fund its new location in South Philadelphia, about half of which was from state lending programs.