Cloverhill Bakery was a producer of baked goods primarily sold through

vending machines A vending machine is an automated machine that dispenses items such as snacks, beverages, cigarettes, and lottery tickets to consumers after cash, a credit card, or other forms of payment are inserted into the machine or payment is otherwise m ...

and retail throughout North America.

History

Cloverhill was founded by William Gee II in Chicago, Illinois, in 1961 as a small family owned vending company that hand-packed pastries. The two sons, William E. Gee III & Edward Gee, took over the business and phased out of the vending business to focus solely on the bakery to provide pastries to the vending machine customers. In 1977 Cloverhill Pastry Vend Corporation, expanded the bakery's facilities on 2020 North Parkside, Chicago, IL and implemented an automated Danish

baking Baking is a method of preparing food that uses dry heat, typically in an oven, but it can also be done in hot ashes, or on hot Baking stone, stones. Bread is the most commonly baked item, but many other types of food can also be baked. Heat is ...

system. With the new Rheon dough lamination line, Cloverhill was able to bake high quality croissants for Burger Kings croissan'wich and eventually baked cinnamon rolls and pastries for Burger King too. Cloverhill also produced doughnuts for

7-Eleven 7-Eleven, Inc. is an American convenience store chain, headquartered in Irving, Texas. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Seven-Eleven Japan, which in turn is owned by the retail holdings company Seven & I Holdings. The chain was founde ...

. Cloverhill used dry ice in the dough process and used a dry ice crusher and dry ice purchased from Continental Carbonics Products, Inc. until May 4, 1984, when it was discovered, after having received complaints from customers concerning its baked goods, that the machine was causing small chips or flakes of metal to be dispersed through the dough. This resulted in Cloverhill filing for bankruptcy; however, the Gee family persevered when William E Gee III two sons, William Gee IV & Robert J. Gee joined the company. They nurtured dedicated employees and brought in a key player to help turn the company around and thus cloverhill emerged from bankruptcy and continued to provide high quality danish products to their loyal customers. In the spring of 1994, Cloverhill broke ground for the new state of the art temperature controlled 60,000 sq. ft manufacturing plant on the former site of the joseph lumber company on 2035 North Narragansett Avenue, Chicago, Illinois. The New production facility was completely ammonia cooled(No freon). boasted the largest custom Pulver-Genau baking oven(supplied by the late George Dunbar of Dunbar Systems), which resulted in the fastest danish pastry line in the world, producing 504 cinnamon rolls a minute. In 2011 Cloverhill opened an additional facility in

Cicero, Illinois Cicero is a town in Cook County, Illinois, United States, and a suburb of Chicago. As of the 2020 census, the population was 85,268, making it the 11th-most populous municipality in Illinois. The town is named after Marcus Tullius Cicero, a R ...

. Cloverhill was acquired by

Aryzta ARYZTA AG is a food business based in Zürich, Switzerland. It operates in Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand. It is incorporated in Switzerland and is listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange (the Zürich Stock Exchange). It discontinued its listi ...

in 2014. In 2017, an

ICE Ice is water that is frozen into a solid state, typically forming at or below temperatures of 0 ° C, 32 ° F, or 273.15 K. It occurs naturally on Earth, on other planets, in Oort cloud objects, and as interstellar ice. As a naturally oc ...

immigration raid on its Chicago facility resulted in the removal of 800 workers who were found to be hired and employed without legal documentation. On February 1, 2018, Aryzta announced that it had sold the Big Texas and Cloverhill brands to

Hostess Brands Hostess Brands Inc. is an American bakery company formed in 2013. Its main operating subsidiaries are Hostess Brands, LLC, and Voortman Cookies Limited. The company owns several bakeries in the United States that produce snack cakes under the ...

Product lines

Their products include

Danish pastries A Danish pastry (sometimes shortened to danish; , ) is a multilayered, laminated sweet pastry in the ''viennoiserie'' tradition. Like other ''viennoiserie'' pastries, such as croissants, it is a variant of puff pastry made of laminated yeast-lea ...

cinnamon roll A cinnamon roll (also known as cinnamon bun, cinnamon swirl, cinnamon scroll, cinnamon Danish and cinnamon snail) is a sweet roll commonly served in Northern Europe (mainly in Nordic countries, but also in Austria, Estonia, The Netherlands and ...

s, crumb cakes, cake

doughnuts A doughnut or donut () is a type of pastry made from leavened fried dough. It is popular in many countries and is prepared in various forms as a sweet snack that can be homemade or purchased in bakeries, supermarkets, food stalls, and franch ...

and honey buns each wrapped for individual sale. Cloverhill Bakery baked goods are also sold through

supermarket A supermarket is a self-service Retail#Types of outlets, shop offering a wide variety of food, Drink, beverages and Household goods, household products, organized into sections. Strictly speaking, a supermarket is larger and has a wider selecti ...

warehouse club A warehouse club (or wholesale club) is a retailing, retail store, usually selling a wide variety of merchandising, merchandise, in which customers may buy large, wholesale quantities of the store's products, which makes these clubs attractive ...

s and

convenience store A convenience store, convenience shop, bakkal, bodega, corner store, corner shop, superette or mini-mart is a small retail store that stocks a range of everyday items such as convenience food, groceries, beverages, tobacco products, lotter ...

s. Cloverhill Bakery is perhaps best known for their production of the Big Texas Cinnamon Roll. The Big Texas is the 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009 Automatic Merchandiser Readers' Choice Pastry of the Year. In 2011, Cloverhill Bakery introduced their Boston Crème Danish, in the New Products category of "Pastry".

References

External links

Cloverhill Bakery website with product information2009 Automatic Merchandiser Readers' Choice Products of the Year

2011 Automatic Merchendiser Readers' Choice Products of the YearPeople ex rel. Joseph Lumber Co. v. City of ChicagoCloverhill Pastry-Vend v. Cont. Carb. ProdBakery cooks up a plan to stay putDunbar SystemsRheon USAThomas Scesniak Architect
Bakeries of the United States Food and drink companies based in Chicago Manufacturing companies based in Chicago {{food-company-stub