"When we decided to build a bakery - the move that brought us to Luverne -we wrote a 10-year plan to support our funding request," Ms. Schubert-Barnes said. "We thought we'd put together a reasonable projection, but our adviser suggested that it looked a little too good. So we toned it down.
"But in just two years, we cxceeded our 10-year plan," she continued. "During 1993, our sales were $140,000. This past year, we exceeded $12 million. We've doubled revenues just about every year. We're ready to do it again."
EXPERT HELP.
"Brand building, that's what it is all about," said George Barnes, vicepresident of Sister Schubert's Homemade Rolls, Inc.
And it's been done primarily by word of mouth. Starting out, if a grocer would agree to sell her product, Ms. Schubert-Barnes and her two daughters, Charlotte and Chrissie, would set up in the store and hand out samples.
"I knew if I could get people to taste my rolls, they would buy them," Ms. SchubertBarnes said.
In a short time, volume grew to the point where she could no longer supervise production and manage delivery all herself. She turned to MrBarnes, a food broker, for more professional distribution. He expanded the company from local sales into regional scale. They married in 1995 and now have a three year-old son, Evans.
0ne of the things I learned in the beginning was to leave some jobs to the experts," Ms. Schubert-Barnes said. "I am the expert at making my rolls, and once I found the experts at sales and marketing that were as enthusiastic about my products, we really started to grow.
"George makes the deals; I make the doughs," she said with a laugh. "In this partnership, I'm the jumper, while George is the one holding the net below."
In the past four years, the market reach of Sister Schubert's Homemade Rolls products moved south ... and north and east and west. The company's Web site, wwmssrolls.com, lists retail locations in 28 states. The site allows secure credit-card ordering and even offers a reproducible letter for shoppers to send to local grocers asking that their stores carry Sister Schubert's Homemade Rolls products.
The current product line includes the company's newest item, blueberrycream-cheese yeast rolls, plus Parkerhouse yeast rolls (Sister Schubert's Homemade Rolls's No. I seller), sausage yeast rolls, cinnamon yeast rolls, orange yeast rolls, southern cornbread and jalapefio combread.
"Four years ago, I thought the new plant would be it for a long time," Ms. Schubert-Barnes said, "but it wasn't."
Guiding the latest expansion were two objectives: increase production and maintain product quality.
"We've gone as quickly as we could, yet as slowly as possible to maintain the product," Ms. Schubert-Barnes said. "Where we could do something manually that made a difference to the product, we kept those methods, and we automated the rest."
In 1995, the company turned to Moline Machinery to automate the forming process. Three years later, it was time for high-tech solutions for flour handling, dough mixing, sheeting, proofing, baking, icing, packaging and freezing. These were supplied by Gemini Bakery Equipment and IJ White Corp. (Systems). A second Moline line was also added. All are state-of-the-art. But Sister Schubert's Homemade Rolls kept its investment in manual methods for panning: Each roll is hand-placed in a round foil tin, the same approach that a home baker would take.
"With this expansion, everything changed. Even the product got better," Ms. Schubert-Barnes said. "Our original expectation was for 60 pans a minute, but we're at 75 pans per minute now. We can bake I million rolls a day, and there's potential for more."
UNCONVENTIONAL BY CHOICE.
Sister Schubert's Homemade Rolls products are not easily automated. In every important way, the Parkerhouse and sweet yeastraised rolls are true to their Southern heritage and utterly authentic, right down to their melt-in-your-mouth eating characteristics.
