MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Historic preservation is a cause that's close to the heart of Patricia Barnes, founder of Sister Schubert's Homemade Rolls. Her belief in its tenets also could be one of the reasons for the company's success.
"If you don't know where you came from, how in the world are you going to know where you're going?" Barnes said.
When Barnes was a little girl, she stood on a stool in the kitchen to help her mother cook. Her grandmother taught her how to make the rolls, which she served to her family on Thanksgiving. That led to a small catering business, a Troy food fair sale and, 20 years ago, the beginning of a bakery that now distributes to stores across the South and Midwest.
Along the way she married business partner George Barnes, but people kept calling her by the nickname her older sibling Charlotte gave the former Patricia Schubert as a child: "Sister."
Barnes celebrated the company's anniversary recently by doing the same thing she did decades ago — laughing with friends and enjoying the rolls — only this time it was with employees and well-wishers at the sprawling Sister Schubert's headquarters in Luverne.
"You have to believe 100 percent in your product or service, and you have to have a good product or service to start with," Barnes said. "Some of (the employees) have been with me the full 20 years, and I said to them, 'I wouldn't be here if you didn't have the same faith that I have.'
"I knew (the rolls) were good, that's for sure."
Still, she said she took a leap of faith when she opened a 25,000-square-feet bakery. Barnes didn't have to worry for long — two years later, they were expanding. By the late 1990s, the company was making a million rolls a day.
"There were many days when I would have to pinch myself when there was another expansion going on," she said. "Corporate jets from Mrs. Smith's and Sara Lee were flying into our little airport."
Barnes and her husband sold their stock in the company in 2000 after finding a company that Barnes said would allow them to keep hands-on roles in the business. Now, Sister Schubert's is a subsidiary of Lancaster Colony's T. Marzetti company, and Barnes focuses on new product development along with other jobs.
"I get to do all the things I love doing," she said. "I don't have to sit in a boardroom."
The sale also allowed her to start the Barnes Family Foundation, which helps feed the hungry and give educational opportunities to children. It also helps care for orphaned and abandoned children, including building a home for children in the Ukraine.
And, yes, the foundation supports historic preservation projects, including buying and overseeing the restoration of an 1867 house to keep it from being destroyed.
The foundation's mission statement is "to show by what we do that we are thankful for food in a hungry world, that we are thankful for friendship in a lonely world, but mostly, that we are thankful for the opportunity to help save and love all of God's children in the world."
