From weeknight dinners to holiday gatherings, a warm Sister Schubert’s dinner roll has served as the perfect complement to any family meal for decades. But who is Sister Schubert?
Well, she’s a real person – a born-and-raised Alabama woman named Patricia Barnes, who earned the nickname “Sister” because her sibling struggled to pronounce her first name.
As a young girl, Sister learned to express her love for family and friends through cooking, raised with a core belief that food had the power to feed both the body and the soul. She spent her childhood cooking with her grandmother, often helping her bake the special Parker House Roll recipe that had been passed through their family for five generations.
In 1989, after bringing her rolls to a food fair at her church in Troy, Alabama and realizing how much her neighbors adored them, Sister began taking orders and baking pans of rolls in her home kitchen, hand-delivering them throughout her community. As the word spread and demand grew, Sister hired her very first employee – a local woman named Carolyn, who came to Sister’s house to bake with her in the afternoons after her shifts working at Troy University.
Within two years, Sister had taken over half of her father’s furniture warehouse and converted it into a bakery. Another year passed, and Sister opened her first commercial bakery in Luverne, Alabama, where she started producing more than one million rolls daily.
“I thought we’d never need to expand. I thought that was all the production capacity we’d ever need,” Sister once stated in an interview with Alabama News Center.
But her assumption was wrong – consumers had fallen head-over-heels for Sister Schubert’s soft, buttery, pull-apart rolls, and demand continued to grow exponentially. In 1998, the Luverne bakery underwent an expansion to 80,000 square feet that enabled Sister Schubert’s to begin producing more than five million rolls each day.
Following the expansion, many large food companies began to approach Sister with an interest in purchasing her company. Sister was hesitant to sell – she loved what she did, and she wanted to protect the integrity of her family’s recipe. But then The Marzetti Company (formerly Lancaster Colony) entered the mix.
The decision to sell Sister Schubert’s to The Marzetti Company in 2000 was ultimately an easy one for Sister. “Most important to me was that they historically purchased family-run companies and then asked those families to continue to help run the company.”
More than 25 years after the acquisition, Sister remains involved in the business, along with her very first employee, Carolyn, who works as a Production Supervisor at the Luverne, Alabama bakery.
The Sister Schubert’s brand has grown to include both savory and sweet rolls for Marzetti’s retail and foodservice businesses, but Sister’s original Parker House Rolls recipe remains at the heart of it all.