OAKLAND, Calif. — At 88 years old, Mother's Cookies is getting a makeover to stay fresh.
Started in Oakland in 1914, Mother's is known for its Taffy and frosted Circus Animal cookies, and its red-and-purple logo featuring Mother's face.
Now Mother's is modernizing its logo, polishing up its packaging and introducing new cookies — a $500,000 makeover intended to keep the company competitive against rivals Nabisco and Keebler. Also, Mother's is following its rivals by reducing the volume of cookies in certain packages while keeping the same price.
A tray of Mother's cookies sells for $2.79 and a bag of cookies sells for $2.99, but the products are often on sale for less. To keep the regular price of bags less than $3, Mother's is reducing the size from 18 ounces to 16 ounces.
"It's our attempt to remain competitive," said Jenni Smith, brand manager for Mother's Cookies.
While pricing matters, brand loyalty is even more important, she said.
"It's what we build our business on," Smith said. "Because we've been around 88 years, we do have a consumer base that grew up on our product.
"The Circus Animals are the same Circus Animals we made 35 years ago when they were a kid. Our goal was to make the Mother's Cookies logo and packaging more contemporary without sacrificing the familiarity of the brand."
Mother's has evolved from a one-man plant making 2,000 cookies a night into part of the No. 3 U.S. cookie company baking 17.5 million cookies a day. The company's 183,000-square-foot Oakland bakery is so big that employees ride tricycles to carry ingredients and keep up with quality control.
The company's newest owner, Parmalat, is investing in Mother's to keep pace with the top two U.S. cookie companies, Nabisco and Keebler.
San Francisco newspaper vendor N.M. Wheatley founded Mother's Cookies in 1914 after he tasted homemade vanilla cookies that an elderly couple sold door-to-door and bought the rights to their recipe.
Wheatley started Mother's with a 3-square-foot oven in a plant in Oakland. The "best little cookie company" moved in 1922 to a larger plant and expanded in 1949 to a site in East Oakland, where it still is today.
The company has been sold a handful of times but has kept its bakery and most employees in Oakland. In late 2000, Parmalat Bakery Division bought Mother's and Archway Cookies from Specialty Foods Corp. of Illinois for $250 million. Parmalat Bakery is a unit of Italy's Parmalat, an international food company known for its milk-in-a-box.
Mother's has kept much of its independence but is looking to use Parmalat's resources to boost sales in states beyond its West Coast base, Smith said. Mother's has sales of $130 million a year — a figure that has stayed flat the past few years, she said.
Mother's small change to its logo is an important step to stay current, said Burt Alper, strategy director of Catchword, an Oakland branding firm, noting that Betty Crocker revised its logo recently.
"The fact they don't change it very often, any change is huge," Alper said. "Just like Betty Crocker, if you don't keep up with the times, you become a very old-fashioned brand."
Also, Mother's is adding to its lineup of more than 50 cookie varieties, launching patriotic Circus Animal cookies with red, white and blue icing; Candy Chip; Fudge Gauchos; and combinations of fudge and mint, graham or peanut butter. The company is introducing Fudge Circus and Mother's Blasters — a chocolate sandwich cookie with popping candy like pop rocks.
"Whereas Nabisco is king of the chocolate sandwich, Oreos, our idea is to come out with something different and interesting and more varieties," Smith said. "The cookie category is all about introducing something new and keeping customers with your brand."
Mother's makes all but a few of its specialty cookies at its Oakland bakery, which employs 300 people, and another 40 in sales and warehousing. Employees play a key role in baking, assorting and quality control — including taste testing.
"There are no thin bakers," production manager John Wright said.
Much of the plant is automated. Cookies are made with fresh ingredients mixed in 2,000-pound batches and baked in one of five 300-foot-long ovens to speed the process. Cookies are packed straight from the production line to preserve freshness and delivered directly from the warehouse to stores.
"We do more with less," Wright said. "There's not too many companies that can say they make 1 million cookies an hour."