![]() You had to have a set menu with only a few things. Instead, she was pigeon-holed to a limited menu and spent most of her time delivering desserts due to the coronavirus restrictions that upended the restaurant world. Gone were the days of spending most of her time in the kitchen whipping up macarons, cheesecakes and an assortment of desserts. ![]() And baking suddenly “wasn’t fun anymore,” she said. Visit for more information.As she was honing her skills in the East Coast city, the pandemic hit. “We’ve got to take care of our customers and be able to fill their orders and stuff and make sure we can tackle what we have now before we take on anything new,” Al Cason said. These include new bite-size sugar wafers and possibly a new cookie butter sandwich cookie in 2018, more new flavors in 2019 and starting up their bakery tours again, which include a cookie train for visitors to ride. While 2018 will mostly be about getting up to speed and fitting the new equipment into their production schedule, Al Cason said the capacity of $1.3 million cookies per hour opens enticing possibilities. The new oven was fired up for the first time in February and Al Cason said the goal is to have it fully up and running in April or May. “There’s nothing cheap in this business,” he said. Though the new oven was a $1.2 million purchase even before the addition of a new mixer and other equipment, Al Cason said they decided it was needed to make sure Bud’s Best no longer had to worry about running behind on filling orders. “We just couldn’t get everything produced.” “You want to run continuously for 12 hours on something to really maximize your runtime,” Al Cason said. Any equipment issues would also put their baking and packaging behind schedule. With the number of different cookies to produce, Al Cason said they were losing valuable production time having to stop and switch recipes. “We’ve expanded out basically as far as we can,” Al Cason said of the physical footprint of the bakery.ĭespite reaching square footage limits, Al Cason said Bud’s Best was still having trouble keeping up with its customers’ orders. They also added equipment to produce all of their sugar wafers in-house in late 2017. “Best choice I ever made was coming to Hoover,” said Bud Cason, who was inducted into the Baking Hall of Fame in 2017.Īl Cason helped his father set up the business, returning home from college each weekend to put together equipment in 1991, and has worked in nearly every department of the business before being made president in 2012.įrom the cookie company’s founding to the present day, Al Cason said they’ve had to make a number of changes to the bakery to keep up with demand: doubling the size of their three ovens and increasing the number of baggers and creme-filling machines for their sandwich cookies. Bud Cason had run other cookie companies before and received a $5 million industrial bond from the city of Hoover to locate his business there. Al Cason said their bakery produces around 20 varieties of Bud’s Best bite-size cookies, about the same number of Uncle Al’s standard-size cookie types and a couple specialty brands that are only sold in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.īud’s Best has been located at Parkway Office Circle in Riverchase since its founding in 1991. The family-owned business is in the midst of adding a fourth oven to their bakery, upping their capacity to 1.3 million cookies baked, iced and packaged nearly every hour of the day. “My father’s been in the cookie business all his life,” said his son and company President Al Cason. Founder Bud Cason, who grew up in his great-aunt and great-uncle’s cookie bakery, will tell people that he practically bleeds chocolate chips. One million cookies per hour come out of the ovens at the Bud’s Best Cookies bakery in Riverchase.
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