Finding Minnesota: Baldinger's Bakery In St. Paul
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- Lunch hour at any McDonald's means a steady stream of cheeseburgers, Big Macs and Quarter Pounders. But before they made their way to hungry customers, each of these buns got their start in St. Paul.
"It's a lot of hamburger buns. For every one of those billions of hamburgers sold on the Arch, all of them had a bun on them," Steve Baldinger said.
Steve will tell you that the bun is the suit of the hamburger. And in that case, the Baldinger family has made billions of suits over the years.
"You're almost expected to follow in your father's footsteps and that's basically what happened to me," Bob Baldinger said.
There are many family-run businesses across the country, but the Baldinger's can trace theirs all the way back to 1888. That's when Bob's grandparents started a bakery in St. Paul.
"Then my father died in 1949 and I got to run the bakery when I was 22-years-old," Bob said.
A scary reality for any young business owner. But as fate would have it, Bob caught the break of a lifetime.
"He explained to me that they are going to open a 15-cent hamburger bun place and be open year-round," Bob said.
The man asking Bob to make buns for his restaurant, worked for Ray Kroc -- an owner of a little venture called McDonald's.
"Who the heck opens a drive-in and is open year-round? Nobody ever did that. And we are going to seal 15-cent hamburgers? Uh, that's crazy," Bob said.
Luckily, Bob said "yes."
"The part he left out was, we had never made a hamburger bun before in this business -- at all," Steve said.
They learned fast. While bigger bakeries said 'no', a hand shake deal meant the Baldinger's supplied the buns for Minnesota's first McDonald's, which opened in Roseville in 1957.
"When we first started with McDonald's they went from one store to two stores to 10 stores to 15 stores and they got big faster than we got big. But McDondald's basically said we are going to stick with the guy who stuck with us," said Steve.
In a sense, the two companies grew together in Minnesota. From a bakery the size of a conference room, to one that now operates on 145,000 square feet.
"We produce -- you can do the math -- 5,500 dozen hamburger buns in one hour," said Steve.
That's 66,000 in an hour. The Baldinger's now ship buns to 586 McDonald's restaurants. Not a bad "hand shake deal" for a Minnesota family.
"It's a great sense of pride to be a part of feeding America and now feeding the world," said Steve.
The Baldinger's also have two bakers in Canada and they have over 200 employees in all three locations.
Right now, they are also making a "Grand Mac" bun for McDonald's, which is bigger than a Big Mac.
Bob turns 90 in July. His sons Steve and Dave are fourth generation employees of the company.