How the cookie crumbles

One million cookies per hour come out of the ovens at the Bud’s Best Cookies bakery in Riverchase. Founder Bud Cason, who grew up in his great-aunt and great-uncle’s cookie bakery, will tell people that he practically bleeds chocolate chips.

“My father’s been in the cookie business all his life,” said his son and company President Al Cason. The family-owned business is in the midst of adding a fourth oven to their bakery, upping their capacity to 1.3 million cookies baked, iced and packaged nearly every hour of the day. Al Cason said their bakery produces around 20 varieties of Bud’s Best bite-size cookies, about the same number of Uncle Al’s standard-size cookie types and a couple specialty brands that are only sold in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Bud’s Best has been located at Parkway Office Circle in Riverchase since its founding in 1991. Bud Cason had run other cookie companies before and received a $5 million industrial bond from the city of Hoover to locate his business there.

“Best choice I ever made was coming to Hoover,” said Bud Cason, who was inducted into the Baking Hall of Fame in 2017.

Al Cason helped his father set up the business, returning home from college each weekend to put together equipment in 1991, and has worked in nearly every department of the business before being made president in 2012. 

From the cookie company’s founding to the present day, Al Cason said they’ve had to make a number of changes to the bakery to keep up with demand: doubling the size of their three ovens and increasing the number of baggers and creme-filling machines for their sandwich cookies. They also added equipment to produce all of their sugar wafers in-house in late 2017.

“We’ve expanded out basically as far as we can,” Al Cason said of the physical footprint of the bakery.

Despite reaching square footage limits, Al Cason said Bud’s Best was still having trouble keeping up with its customers’ orders. With the number of different cookies to produce, Al Cason said they were losing valuable production time having to stop and switch recipes. Any equipment issues would also put their baking and packaging behind schedule.

“You want to run continuously for 12 hours on something to really maximize your runtime,” Al Cason said. “We just couldn’t get everything produced.”

Though the new oven was a $1.2 million purchase even before the addition of a new mixer and other equipment, Al Cason said they decided it was needed to make sure Bud’s Best no longer had to worry about running behind on filling orders.

“There’s nothing cheap in this business,” he said.

The new oven was fired up for the first time in February and Al Cason said the goal is to have it fully up and running in April or May. While 2018 will mostly be about getting up to speed and fitting the new equipment into their production schedule, Al Cason said the capacity of $1.3 million cookies per hour opens enticing possibilities. These include new bite-size sugar wafers and possibly a new cookie butter sandwich cookie in 2018, more new flavors in 2019 and starting up their bakery tours again, which include a cookie train for visitors to ride.

“We’ve got to take care of our customers and be able to fill their orders and stuff and make sure we can tackle what we have now before we take on anything new,” Al Cason said.

Visit budsbestcookies.com for more information.