Auntie Anne's

Anne Beiler was born in 1949 in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, into an Old Order Amish family that converted to the Amish Mennonite faith when she was three; she grew up in the small town of Gap with limited access to electricity and cars, and finished no more than an eighth-grade education. On February 2, 1988, she took over a stand at the Downingtown farmers' market — twelve feet by twenty, $250 a month, bought for $6,000 financed by her in-laws — to help fund her husband Jonas's work as a marriage and family counselor. It was not a pretzel shop. The stand opened selling pizza, stromboli, ice cream, and hand-rolled soft pretzels, and the pizza was soon dropped once it became obvious which item people actually wanted.

Even the pretzels started badly. Sales stayed weak until a supply mishap pushed Anne and Jonas into reworking the recipe, and the improved version quadrupled pretzel sales within a few months. The name came from what her nieces and nephew called her. A second stand opened in Harrisburg that same year, and in early 1989 she began franchising — informally at first, her brother Jake Smucker the first franchisee, the fee somewhere between $2,500 and $5,000 plus a cut of monthly revenue. Eight stands were open by the end of that first year. After the company consulted a franchise-development firm in 1991, the fee rose to $15,000. The move that mattered most had already happened: in November 1989, Auntie Anne's opened its first location in a shopping mall.

That was the whole business, as it turned out. The chain grew to 50 stores by 1990, 90 by 1991, 279 by 1994, 408 by 1996, 558 by 1998, and nearly 600 by 2000, and it grew on a marketing strategy with no marketing in it: the baking aroma, the sight of employees hand-rolling and twisting the dough in full view of the counter, and free samples handed out on toothpicks. You did not need an advertisement when the smell traveled the length of the concourse. By 2000 the menu had settled into roughly ten varieties — Cinnamon Sugar, Glazin' Raisin, Jalapeño, and Parmesan Herb, which arrived in November 1998, among them — served with caramel, sweet mustard, marinara, cheese, chocolate, or one of three cream cheese dips, alongside lemonade and the slushy Dutch Ice. Beiler's stated philosophy was "Put people first, profits will follow," and by 1998 some thirty of her relatives worked for the company.

Unlike most of the mall, Auntie Anne's never had a fade. It kept expanding into airports, train stations, outlet centers, and university campuses. In 2005, after seventeen years, Anne and Jonas Beiler sold the company for an undisclosed sum to Sam Beiler — the Beilers' second cousin, who had started out as a franchisee in 1989 and worked his way up to president and chief operating officer. It was he who sold it on, and when FOCUS Brands announced its acquisition of the chain on October 8, 2010 — again for a price that was never disclosed — Auntie Anne's was running nearly 1,100 stores in 44 states and 21 countries. It counted roughly 1,200 locations as of 2023 and now sits alongside Cinnabon under the same corporate parent, which renamed itself GoTo Foods in February 2024. The company likes to bill itself as the world's largest hand-rolled soft pretzel franchise. That is its own claim rather than an independent finding, but nobody seems especially motivated to dispute it.