History of the former Bachman Pretzel Company

The Bachman story starts in Reading, Pennsylvania, with a young immigrant baker named Joseph S. Bachman. Joseph was born in 1863 in Austria and came to the United States with his parents, Francis and Margaret Bachman, in 1868. He grew up in Reading, went through the city’s public and parochial schools, and worked a string of blue-collar jobs — first at Koenig’s Marble Yard, then delivering the Daily Post, and later at Penn Hardware — before apprenticing with Anthony Vogelman, who baked “bretzels” along with other goods. The Bachman story starts in Reading, Pennsylvania, with a young immigrant baker named Joseph S. Bachman. Joseph was born in 1863 in Austria and came to the United States with his parents, Francis and Margaret Bachman, in 1868. He grew up in Reading, went through the city’s public and parochial schools, and worked a string of blue-collar jobs — first at Koenig’s Marble Yard, then delivering the Daily Post, and later at Penn Hardware — before apprenticing with Anthony Vogelman of 933 Walnut St., Reading, who baked “bretzels” along with other goods.

By 1884, Bachman struck out on his own with a tiny operation at 450 North 11th Street in Reading. He had one small oven and a horse-drawn delivery wagon. He was making pretzels by hand, packing them by hand, and delivering them himself. Over the next decade and a half, he moved several times within the city — Moss Street, Mifflin Street, Fifth Street, then finally a larger brick complex at 836 North 8th Street with production buildings stretching down Nicolls Street.

Below: Bachman Pretzel Co. Nicholls Street Facility.

Those moves weren’t random. They tell you how fast the demand was growing. Around the turn of the 20th century, Bachman stopped making general bakery goods and focused entirely on pretzels — a very Reading move, because hard pretzels were already becoming one of the city’s calling cards. By 1908, the Bachman bakery on North 8th/Nicholls was running day and night. About 30 employees were on the payroll, some on night shift, two wagons were constantly out on the streets, and the plant was turning out roughly 400 barrels of pretzels per week.

Below: Bachman Pretzel Co. Horse-Drawn Wagon.

The former Bachman Pretzel Company, was founded by Joseph S. Bachman in 1884.

Joseph S. Bachman (b. 1863 – d. 1914), was born in Austria, and came to America with his parents, Francis and Margaret (Settler) Bachman, in 1868. He was educated in the public and parochial schools of Reading, and his first work was at Koenig’s Marble Yard, which position he left to engage in carrying the Daily Post for Wilhelm Rosenthal. His next employment was with the Penn Hardware Company, where he remained about one year, and he then apprenticed himself with Anthony Vogelman of 933 Walnut St., Reading. Vogelmann occasionally made bretzels, or pretzels, along with a general line of goods.

After several years spent as a journeyman, Mr. Bachman in 1884 engaged in business at No. 450 North Eleventh Street, where he spent three years, was for one year at No. 232 Mifflin Street, and then engaged in model baking on Fifth Street. Later he removed to No. 609 Moss Street, and in 1897 removed to 836 N. 8th Street with a back building at 837-839-841-843 Nicolls street, where he occupied a three-story building, which property he owned. It was around this time that he discontinued the general line of baked goods to concentrate solely on pretzel-making. The output at this bakery was 400 barrels of pretzels per week.

It’s important to pause here and understand what “pretzels” meant in Reading at that moment. Pretzel baking in Berks County wasn’t just a snack trade — it was a craft tradition with German roots. Reading was already packed with pretzel bakers by the late 1800s and early 1900s: names like Lichtenthaler, Hendricks & Adams, and later Sturgis, all operating in dense city blocks, all guarding their dough recipes and lye-boil process like state secrets. The city was already calling itself the pretzel capital, and outside Berks County people were ordering Reading pretzels by the barrel. Bachman was part of that first wave of bakeries that took pretzels from “the thing the neighborhood baker throws in with the bread” to a standalone product with its own distribution.

Joseph Bachman died in 1914. His son, Francis J. Bachman, continued to run the company and pushed it further toward scale.

After World War I, pretzels stopped being just a Reading specialty you shipped in barrels and started becoming a packaged, branded snack. Under Francis Bachman, the company modernized. In the 1920s it built a second plant north of the city at 2501 Kutztown Road in Hyde Park (Muhlenberg Township). That move matters: it marks the shift from crowded city-block baking to a true industrial facility with room for ovens, dryers, packing, and shipping under one roof. The old North 8th Street/Nicholls Street bakery in Reading was eventually shut down.

By this point, Bachman was no longer just “a Reading baker.” It was an incorporated company with regional reach. The Reading area, meanwhile, was becoming famous for pretzels on a national scale. By mid-century, people were calling Reading — loudly and proudly — the pretzel capital of the United States, and Bachman was one of the reasons why.

The 1930s are where Bachman steps out of the “regional bakery” category and into snack industry history.

In the early 1930s, people still believed one part of pretzel-making could not be automated: the twist. The dough could be mixed mechanically, cut mechanically, rolled mechanically — but that signature pretzel knot had to be done by hand. Even Robert Ripley of “Believe It or Not!” fame said you simply couldn’t build a machine that could twist a proper pretzel.

Bachman and Reading proved him wrong.

In 1934, after the company had been reorganized into Bachman Bakeries Corporation, an in-house engineer named Jay Curtis (identified in company lore as “Earl” or “Jay” Curtis in different tellings, associated with the Bachman operation at South Temple/Hyde Park) helped develop an automatic pretzel twisting machine. This was huge. It meant you could suddenly produce uniform, recognizable, traditional-style hard pretzels at industrial speed without losing the classic looped shape. That single leap is part of why Reading, and Bachman in particular, could ship pretzels all over the East Coast — and eventually across the country.

At the same time, Bachman was also modernizing how snacks were sold. Under the leadership that followed the 1934 reorganization, the company leaned into ideas that were cutting-edge for grocery retail back then: things like sealed cellophane packaging (to keep pretzels crisp and visible), ready-to-display shipping cartons, and aggressive branded marketing of snack foods, not just bulk barrels.

This is where Bachman quietly stops being just a “pretzel bakery” and becomes a snack company.

After World War II and into the postwar boom, Bachman expanded fast, partly by buying other companies. Between 1950 and 1953, Bachman acquired two other pretzel makers — Pennsylvania Pretzel of Allentown and Purity Pretzel of Harrisburg — and also doubled the size of its Reading/Hyde Park facility.

By the mid-1950s, Bachman was pulled into a larger vision. In 1956, incorporated as part of Helme Products, a New Jersey manufacturer of pipe and chewing tobacco. The thinking at the time sounds strange today but made sense in the Eisenhower era: put tobacco, snacks, candy — basically “leisure products” — under one umbrella and sell them together.

From there, Bachman started behaving like a modern consumer packaged goods company:

• Nuts: In 1959 the company picked up Crown Nut Company, bringing roasted nut snacks into the line.

• Corn snacks and cheese curls: In 1962, Bachman acquired Jack’s Tasty Snack Corp. of Oneida, New York. That deal brought in corn-based, cheese-dusted curls — the product that became “Jax,” which went on to become one of the company’s signature items and a fierce competitor to the pretzel itself in terms of popularity in the Northeast.

• Popcorn: In 1963, Bachman bought New England Popcorn and pulled popcorn and corn chips under the Bachman umbrella.

• Candy: Through the late 1960s, the company experimented with sweets, absorbing King Kup Candy, Schoener Candy, and W.F. Schrafft Candy between 1966 and 1969. (Candy would eventually get spun off, but it shows how aggressively Bachman was chasing every “snack aisle” category.)

• Frozen soft pretzels: In 1968, Bachman bought Mayfair Foods Specialty Co. of Philadelphia. Mayfair originally made frozen waffles, but Bachman quickly converted that capacity into frozen soft pretzels — an early signal that pretzels weren’t just a bar snack, they were becoming a freezer staple in American grocery stores.

By the 1970s, only one giant segment was missing: potato chips. So Bachman went on a chip-buying spree: Valley Maid in eastern Pennsylvania (1969), King Cole Foods in New England (1970), Treat Company in New York City (1971), and Schuler Potato Chips in Rochester, New York (1973). In 1980, Bachman even took over distribution of Cain’s Potato Chips in New England.

In other words, by the late 1970s Bachman wasn’t just “the pretzel people.” It was a full-spectrum snack house with pretzels, chips, popcorn, nuts, cheese curls, even frozen soft pretzels — one of the largest snack companies in the country, and one that still traced its physical heart back to Reading.

Corporate consolidation cuts both ways. Helme Products and later Culbro Corporation (a cigar and tobacco giant that had taken an interest in Helme and its profitable snack arm) couldn’t make the marriage work. By 1980, Bachman Foods — as it was then known — was sold off. The buyer was Joseph Francis Welch, a Reading-area entrepreneur.

Welch did something symbolically important: he put the headquarters back in Reading and leaned back into the company’s local identity. Through the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, Bachman Pretzels and Jax cheese curls held strong market share across the Northeast, and the Bachman name was still printed with “Reading, PA” pride.

The Hyde Park complex — a later facility on Spring Valley Road just off Kutztown Road in Muhlenberg Township — became the core bakery. The company also operated a production plant in Ephrata, Lancaster County. By this point, Bachman-branded products weren’t just pretzel rods and traditional hard twists, but thin pretzels, sticks, penny rods, popcorn, tortilla chips, and more.

The next big turning point came in 2012.

That year, The Bachman Company sold its core brands — “Bachman,” “Jax,” “Thin’n Right,” and “Chipitos” — plus its Ephrata plant and much of its distribution network to Utz Quality Foods, another Pennsylvania-based snack powerhouse.

But this wasn’t the end of Bachman in Reading.

Instead of folding completely into Utz, the Reading/Muhlenberg operation essentially reinvented itself. Bachman’s leadership — including then-CEO Scott Carpenter — repositioned the remaining company to focus on contract manufacturing and private label baking, especially pretzels. The company renamed itself Savor Street Foods, Inc., kept the Hyde Park/Spring Valley Road bakery in Berks County, and kept making pretzels (including some products for Utz) under that new identity.

Under the Savor Street Foods name, the company also leaned into specialty and “better for you” snacks. In 2014 it added a dedicated gluten-free baking line, and by 2018 it was producing what it calls the industry’s first grain-free pretzel — a sign that the same company that once sold barrels of classic salted twists by horse cart in the 1880s was now engineering pretzels for modern allergen-aware, label-reading shoppers.

Even more recently, Savor Street has emphasized social mission: they highlight inclusive hiring, especially employing autistic adults in meaningful roles at the Reading-area bakery, and present themselves not just as a co-packer but as a legacy family bakery that never left its hometown.

If you grew up in Berks County, you didn’t just eat Bachman pretzels — you absorbed them. You saw the red-and-white bags at corner stores, at Acme down the shore, at church picnics, at Little League snack stands. Former workers still talk about night shift lines at Bachman plants in places like Birdsboro in the 1960s, loading ovens and packing tins.

And that goes beyond nostalgia. Bachman is one of the threads that helped stitch Reading’s identity as “the Pretzel Capital,” a nickname that first formed in the early-to-mid 1900s when there were more than two dozen pretzel factories in and around the city and local bakers were shipping millions of pretzels a week across the country.

The company went from one immigrant baker with a single coal-fired oven in 1884… to a vertically integrated snack manufacturer that owned popcorn houses, peanut roasters, chip fryers, candy lines, frozen soft pretzel plants, and multiple bakeries across Pennsylvania and beyond by the 1970s… to a modern co-packer producing gluten-free and grain-free pretzels under private labels in the 2010s and 2020s.

But the core stayed weirdly constant: a Reading-area plant, real pretzel dough, and that familiar Bachman twist.