Meet The Mother Of Three Who Made Nearly $200 Million Baking McDonald’s Buns

The Texas native bought her first McDonald’s franchise three decades ago. Now she makes serious dough delivering 9 million baked goods daily for 1,500 customers, including the burger chain, Pepperidge Farm and Five Guys.

^Cordia Harrington keeps a chart in her Nashville office of all 18 recessions since the Great Depression as well as when major companies, such as FedEx and Microsoft, got their start in the valleys. “I believe a recession is a rich time to start a business,” the 67-year-old says, wearing a bright pink sweater and classic Van Cleef clover necklace. “There’s problems to be solved.”

Harrington has figured out how to ride the waves to a $180 million fortune and counting. She started three different businesses in challenging times.  In 1981, she opened a real estate brokerage firm in Arkansas when interest rates were as high as 15%. She bought her first of three McDonald’s franchises in 1990 during another economic downturn. When the Bakery Cos., her third act, opened its first baking facility in 1997 to supply hamburger buns to McDonald’s, the fast food giant slashed prices to compete with Burger King and Wendy’s, nearly pushing her out of business just as she was getting started. “I thought I would watch myself slowly go bankrupt,” she recalls.  

Now she is steering her bun company through Covid-19. “One way to look at the pandemic is it’s a good time to regroup and to put things into place so that you’re ready to go when the buyer does come back,” Harrington says. “There’s pent up demand. People are anxious to get out of the house and into restaurants.”

The Upside of Downturns

A chart similar to the one below, which tracks recessions since the Great Depression, hangs in Harrington’s Nashville office as a daily reminder of the opportunities that come in the most challenging times.

U.S. recessions are shaded; the most recent end date is undecided. | Data shown is through Q2 2020.

^{Red Line: Gross Domestic Product | Source: U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis | fred.stlouisfed.org}

In fortuitous timing, she sold a majority stake in the $100 million-plus (revenues) baked goods company to Chicago private equity firm Arbor Investments in September 2019 for an undisclosed sum. Arbor pumped in another $50 million this year, half dedicated to new equipment. The Bun Company also acquired two factories in late spring and opened a new production line for croissants in November.  

Today its six industrial bakeries pump out some 9 million baked goods daily for 1,500 customers including Five Guys and Pepperidge Farm, mostly in the Southeast and Midwest. Harrington, who is still CEO and owns a minority stake, has no plans to step away from the business. “My goal is for our products to be on every street corner in America, whether it’s a convenience store or grocery store or a restaurant,” she says.

^One of America’s richest self-made women entrepreneurs, Harrington credits her persistence and her religious belief—she is a devout Presbyterian—for her success. “There were many times I felt hopeless and if it weren’t for my faith, I would have probably hung it up,” she says. “I did cry myself to sleep a lot, but I would wake up and have a renewed feeling of hope. You just take one day at a time and keep going forward.”

Born in Waco, Texas, in 1953, she is the daughter of a salesman and a homemaker. Her father’s career took the family to Buffalo, New York and St. Louis, Missouri. She showed an entrepreneurial streak at an early age, starting an informal daycare in their backyard when she was 11. Her starting rate was 25 cents to take care of one child for the week.

She went off to the University of Arkansas in 1971 and worked part time to help pay for tuition. She graduated from college — the first in her family to do so — with a degree in home economics in 1975 and got a job answering phones and booking trips at a travel agency in Jonesboro, Arkansas. The same agency also owned a real estate company. She got her real estate license and quickly started making more money from selling houses than booking trips.

Harrington decided to open her own real estate firm in 1981. The then-28-year-old used her entire life savings of $587 to make signs and paid $4.5 a month for a desk and chair in a half-empty doctor’s office. “We started selling a lot of houses to the point where the men from the bank would come by to see what the ladies were doing,” says Harrington, who hired her female friends with no experience in real estate.

By 1986, Harrington had divorced her husband of nine years and was raising three young children by herself. She was tired of spending nights and weekends selling houses. One of her past clients owned a McDonald’s franchise, and she envied how the person could spend time with their family. So she applied to be a franchisee and three years later got the chance. 

“Most women who were owner-operators had inherited them [franchises] from their deceased husbands,” Harrington says. “When I interviewed, they went, ‘What makes you think you can run a McDonald’s?’ I said, ‘These are working girl’s hands. I’ll clean the bathrooms. I’ll clean the toilets. Just give me a chance.’”

McDonald’s took her at her word. Like all prospective owner-operators, she had to work 2,200 hours (more than a full year of 40-hour weeks) with no pay to learn every aspect of running a restaurant. She was assigned to a restaurant in Little Rock, over an hour’s drive from her home in Russellville, even though there was a franchise only 15 minutes from her house. She hired a college student to watch her kids so she could leave the house before dawn, crying during her commute while the sun rose.

Nicknamed “The Bun Lady” at a 2000 conference in Nashville, she has embraced the moniker, sometimes wearing fake buns to speaking engagements.

After a year and a half of training, Harrington was able to buy her first franchise in 1990. She sold her house and several of Arkansas properties she owned, and took a loan to make the $450,000 down payment for the $1.7 million (about $3.4 million in today’s money) restaurant in Effingham, Illinois. The town only had 12,000 residents but was well-situated off the I-57 and I-78 between Chicago and St. Louis. 

Two months after opening, McDonald’s announced it was introducing a value meal. Suddenly, the price for a hamburger and french fries went from $7 to $2.99. Revenues took an immediate hit, and she struggled to make the monthly payments of $27,500.

Harrington started making calls on her CB radio, telling bus drivers that she would give them a free meal in exchange for bringing their passengers to her restaurant. She says she later bought a Greyhound franchise and put it on the corner of the McDonald’s, bringing about 88 buses a day. Harrington worked more than 70 hours a week, frequently bringing her kids to the restaurant. She tried to make fun competitions out of who could clean tables fastest or put the most toys in Happy Meals. After a year and a half, she bought a second franchise in Altamont, Illinois. 

In 1993, she became the only woman on McDonald’s bun committee and got to see the global supply chain firsthand, visiting a bun plant in Kansas City and touring a bakery in Germany. She was fascinated to learn about what went into making a McDonald’s bun, including flour from Russia and sesame seeds from Guatemala.

When she learned that McDonald’s was looking to increase diversity in its supply chain, Harrington pitched herself despite having no experience in baking and was turned down. She campaigned aggressively, spending two weeks in a bakery and working every position including tray stacking and mixing. She sent photos of herself at a wheat mill as well as a baseball signed by Hall of Fame player Red Schoendienst to McDonald’s corporate, writing, “I’m ready to be your Hall of Fame baker.”

“It wasn’t like there was an opening,” remembers Steve Lykins, a member of the bun committee and a former McDonald’s owner-operator. “She just made it her job to convince McDonald’s she could do the job well. She was told ‘no’ a number of times and it didn’t faze her.”

It took a few years and 32 interviews for McDonald’s to say yes in January 1996. According to Harrington, her accountant and lawyer begged her to reconsider giving up her $600,000-a-year income from the McDonald’s franchises. Her company would be sandwiched between publicly traded giants like Flowers Foods and longstanding family-owned bakeries. “There are plenty of baking companies that have pictures of horse-driven wagons hanging on their walls from the roots of the business in the 1870s,” says Josh Sosland, editor of Milling & Baking News and Food Business News magazines. 

Harrington, 43 at the time, went ahead anyway, selling the franchises and taking a $15.3 million loan to found the Tennessee Bun Company. “Ray Kroc was 52 years old when he founded McDonald’s,” Harrington points out. “Your age doesn’t matter. It’s your energy and determination.”

She opened the first plant in August 1996 in Dickson, Tennessee. Its production line baked 1,000 buns a minute for franchises in the Tennessee area. It took precision to produce buns worthy of the Golden Arches. Without the exact balance of sugar and other ingredients, the bun fails to caramelize when toasted and heated all the way through. McDonald’s purchasers visited their suppliers regularly to evaluate the products; a score of under 90 was unacceptable.

“The size, the thickness, the ingredients make the taste of our hamburger what Ray Kroc started 65 years ago,” says Fred Tillman, a retired owner-operator who bought Harrington’s buns for more than 50 of his franchises. “If it varies by a half-inch or so, you don’t have the right meat to bun ratio. The consistency of Cordia’s buns was always in the high 90s.”

The initial budget for the Tennessee Bun Company was based on 12 years of sales data with the average franchisee buying 770 buns per week But according to Harrington, McDonald’s regional bun sales had fallen 38% by the time the bakery opened eight months later, as the fast food chain lost business to rivals. With franchisees buying fewer buns, the Tennessee Bun Company went into the red. “By then I was so far into it. I had sold the restaurants and taken [on] tremendous debt, so I had to make it work.”

Harrington asked McDonald’s if she could make more buns for additional locations but was turned down. She started seeking out other customers, which was verboten for McDonald’s vendors. “There was a perception at McDonald’s at that time that a vendor could only be a dedicated vendor,” recalls Steve Lykins. “If you’re a McDonald’s bakery, we need all of your focus and energy to go to McDonald’s.”

Harrington knew this but took the risk anyway. She called a contact at Pepperidge Farm and worked out a non-competitive arrangement to produce its cornmeal split top buns. McDonald’s was skeptical of the arrangement, but Harrington won them over by submitting reports every month documenting how much McDonald’s saved by sharing overhead with Pepperidge. The first check from Pepperidge in 1999 and the last of Harrington’s savings made payroll.

She didn’t wait long to expand after emerging from the brink of bankruptcy. She acquired a Nashville plant later in 1999. Two years later, the Tennessee Bun Company was providing the bread for Egg McMuffins and eventually began supplying restaurants, including restaurant chain O’Charley’s, which bought its soft yeast rolls starting in 2007. 

Starting in 2013, Harrington landed a slew of major clients: Five Guys, Jason’s Deli and Whole Foods. The insatiable Harrington set her sights on a new goal: to become the leader in the sandwich category as a bread supplier and packager. The company expanded outside Tennessee for the first time in 2014 with the acquisition of Atlanta-based Masada Bakery, which produced organic bagels, buns and bread as well as Danish pastries. Shortly after, Harrington rechristened the company The Bakery Cos. to recognize that it made far more than buns.

“There are so many different kinds of sandwiches,” she says. “We’re not a brand; we serve brands. If they’re trying to innovate a new waffle sandwich or a new baguette, and we’ve got capacity and capabilities to do a wide variety of things, hopefully that customer will think about us.”

In the fall of 2018 Harrington wanted to spend $70 million on a new facility in Arkansas. Her estate attorney balked at the figure and said she should get outside investors. Harrington was hesitant, but the following summer, she happened to be seated next to Greg Purcell, the founder of Arbor Investments, at a dinner for the American Bakers Association. “I felt like he was a brother from a different mother,” she recalls. “Before we even left, I thought, with his money, and my drive and my talented people, we could really become a huge success in the bakery industry and be a leading sandwich carrier.”

Purcell visited the Tennessee bakeries two weeks later. A week later she went to Chicago to negotiate with Arbor. The deal closed on September 30, 2019, the 29th anniversary of the opening of Harrington’s first McDonald’s franchise. Harrington signed the deal to help expand the business but it may have helped save it during the pandemic. 

Her restaurant clients have yet to fully recover, but demand has increased from hospitals and, notably, retail customers such as ConAgra, which makes sausage biscuits with the Bakery Cos.’ rolls. Over the summer, the Bakery Cos. inked a new contract with one of the world’s largest meat suppliers.

Covid-19 has forced Harrington, an avid networker, to slow down. All her board meetings, conferences and visits with customers and employees, came to a halt or were switched to Zoom. She spends more time at home in Nashville with her husband Tom, who she married in 1997 and served as the company’s Chief Financial Officer until retiring two years ago. She has also taken to virtually mentoring McDonald’s owner-operators. With roughly $100 million in cash and other investments, based on Forbes estimates, Harrington also has stakes in 10 women-owned businesses, including a solar power grid startup in Namibia.

“I believe that entrepreneurs are born with a sense of restlessness,” she says. “If you believe you’re supposed to build a business, build a business and don’t let any obstacle get in your way. Don’t let age be a barrier, don’t let being a mom be a barrier. We only get to go around this life one time.”