The Sweetheart of American Snacks: The “Little Debbie” Story

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people, coming to you from the city where the West begins, Fort Worth, Texas. Whether you’re a die-hard Cosmic Brownie fan or a lover of Zebra Cakes, Nutty Buddy, Star Crunch, or the annual Christmas Tree Cakes, Little Debbie is a brand you’ve probably seen time and again on almost every grocery store shelf in America. Here to tell the story of Little Debbie is Simon Whistler from the Today I Found Out YouTube channel and its sister, The Brain Food Show podcast. Let’s take a listen.

It was nineteen thirty-three, and the United States was in the throes of the Great Depression. Nearly a quarter of the nation was unemployed, and breadlines went on for blocks. In short, many were desperate, including Ode and Ruth McKee, who had lost most of their money due to a bank failure. What the couple did still have, however, was a nineteen twenty-eight Whippet car. According to McKee Foods’ official history, this is when Ode started selling five-cent Virginia Dare cakes, made by Becker’s Bakery, out of the back of said vehicle. By the next year, business was good enough that they were able to purchase a Chattanooga, Tennessee, bakery, Jack’s Cookie Company. In what was a unique arrangement for the time, Ruth became a full managing partner in the business with her husband. While Ode traveled the state making sales and coming up with some innovative ways to reduce new product, she baked, managed the office, and took charge of the few employees that they had. They were, as the company’s official history put it, ideal business partners because her cautious, conservative nature was the perfect complement to his risk-taking, adventuresome spirit. Years later, Jack McKee would explain that his parents had a unique opportunity during the Great Depression, and they took a risk. A few months later, that seemed to be paying off, with the bakery moving to a larger location down the street, but all wasn’t perfect. In nineteen thirty-four, they took on Ruth’s father, Simon King, as a partner. It’s not clear why they did it. Perhaps they needed an infusion of capital, or maybe they trusted King’s business instincts. Either way, it doesn’t appear to have been a match made in cake heaven. In nineteen thirty-six, over a business disagreement, the company split, with the couple selling their share and moving to Charlotte, North Carolina, to found a new bakery, while King took over the Tennessee shop, which he renamed King’s Bakery. McKee’s official history leaves a giant gap between nineteen thirty-six and nineteen fifty-two. However, it seems that each bakery operated with moderate success, though with little known about them other than that. It was during this period that Ode invented what is known today as the company’s oldest continuously sold product, the Oatmeal Cream Pie, Cream High, the original OCP.

It first hit the shelves in nineteen sixty-two: oatmeal cookies layered with cream. So, one wrap, a smile, and taste the dream. Want to guess how many we make?

It sure is a lot, because today we bake.

By the mid-twentieth century, Ode and his wife decided to sell their bakery and reportedly mulled over retiring, but at the request of Ruth’s brother, Cecil, who at this point was running King’s Bakery, returned to help out managing it rather than run someone else’s company for them. Not long after, Ode and Ruth decided to buy the bakery back and rename it McKee Baking Company. The company quickly flourished under their management, which included the then innovative idea to sell their product in family packs—individually wrapped baked goods, which were sold as a packaged deal. Specifically, in the late nineteen-fifties, McKee Foods began producing family packs of twelve individually wrapped cakes in one unit. Thanks to you essentially selling them in bulked customers. It allowed the company to drop the price per unit slightly while enjoying a significant boost in product sales at the same time. According to Jack McKee, one of the couple’s sons, most other snack companies didn’t begin packaging items this way for another decade or two. This all brings us to how a straw-hat-clad, smiling girl named Debbie ended up on the front of the boxes of mini treats. There are slightly conflicting stories on how Ode came up with the idea to use Little Debbie, but the general tale goes that a packaging salesman, Bob Mosher, told Ode that the McKee name was boring and that he needed something better to do sales. Casting out, Ode supposedly noticed a picture of his granddaughter, Debbie, daughter of his son Ellsworth and daughter-in-law Sharon McKee, on his desk, and a light bulb went off in his heat. Still wanting to use a family name, Ode decided on naming the company’s new line after Debbie and to use the picture on his desk of her in a straw hat as a logo. Whether that’s exactly how he came up with the idea or not, we do know definitively that he had said picture in his office and that after inspiration struck, he didn’t tell Debbie’s parents before going through with the final prinsing. Not long off, the famed penne artist Pearl Freshman used the picture of Ode’s desk to create a colored rendition of the little girl that still graces the boxes to this day. McKee Foods is still family-owned by second and the generation McKees.

At our family bakeries, it takes a big, talented team to bake all of these snacks. My grandfather O.D. McKee believed in innovation and automation. He was the Henry Ford of snack cakes. While not an engineer by trade, he spent countless hours in venting ways to make the lines run more efficiently. My dad, Jack McKee, joined the company as an engineer in the sixties. I followed in his footsteps and became an engineer too. Today, that innovative philosophy continues, and we’re doing things that Granddad would have never imagined.

I’ve been working at the key Foods of the Bakery, as we like to call us, since I was sixteen and done basically a lot of different jobs around the company.

I love what we do. I mean, selling Little Debbies, selling some belt bakery, be more fun?

We have about six thousand employees nationwide, and here in the Chado Garry, we got about thirty-five hundred employees, and we just want to treat our employees like family.

As for Little Debbie McKee Fowler, she’s now all grown up and is the current Executive Vice President of the company and runs the Little Debbie brands.

As a founder of the Little Debbie Bakery, Ruth McKee was a groundbreaking businesswoman. She was a working mom, and she encouraged education for employees to advance and grow. Ruth McKee was a role model for women in leadership. She was my role model. She was also my Grammy. I’m Debbie McKee Fowler. Today, I’m Chairman of the Board, but you know me as Little Debbie.

While the snack cake companies may be struggling, McKee Foods keeps thriving. In twenty-fifteen, they announced an over one-hundred-million-dollar investment in their College Dell factory. In addition, they recently acquired Drake’s Cakes, which make Devil Dogs and Yodels, for twenty-seven point five million from the bankrupt Hostess.

A terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hangler, and a special thanks to Simon Whistler from the Today I Found Out YouTube channel and its sister, The Brain Food Show podcast. Check both of them out. They have terrific and regularly great content, and what a story we heard! Little Debbie is now the Chairman of the Board of McKee Foods. The story of Little Debbie here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here again, and I’d like to encourage you to subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every story we Are Here is uploaded there daily, and your support goes a long way to keeping the great stories you love from this show coming again. Please subscribe to the Our American Stories podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.