KANSAS CITY — For the new chair of the American Bakers Association, the expression “coming full circle” has rich meaning.

Since the 2017 merger of the ABA and the Biscuit & Cracker Manufacturers’ Association, William M. Quigg has become the first former BCMA chair to lead the combined group. As chief executive officer of Richmond Baking Co., Richmond, Ind., Quigg heads a business that operates both one of the oldest and one of the newest and most advanced baking facilities in the industry. And in ascending to the ABA helm, an achievement he described as a “lifelong dream,” Quigg resumes a rich and poignant family history of ABA leadership.

Quigg assumes the ABA chair at a momentous time for the association. Eric Dell has been president and CEO of the ABA for just over a year, an ambitious new strategic plan has been adopted and is just now setting into motion, and the industry will gather in 17 months for the triennial IBIE. Asked about all that is transpiring at the ABA and across the baking industry, Quigg responded with equanimity, first tipping his cap to Cordia Harrington, his predecessor.

“People are put in positions at times they are most needed,” he said when interviewed by Milling & Baking News at the ABA annual meeting in Scottsdale, Ariz., in mid-April. “Cordia was the perfect person to head the organization during the transition to new leadership at the association,” he said. “I think I’m in the perfect position to bring the industry’s different associations to common goals and hopefully culminating with IBIE.”

At one level, the path for Quigg to take as ABA chair already has been established.

“The strategic plan is set,” he said. “Even with that, there are strengths I bring having to do with the history of all these associations. By nature I’m a collaborator, and because I’ve had different relationships with the different groups, folks know I want individual organizations in our industry to succeed.”

This perspective is balanced by a belief that a duplication of efforts should be avoided, and that the ABA has a role to play as a convener in addressing duplication.

“The baking industry has been through a lot of challenges, and I feel as though I can be part of an effort to figure out common goals so we can share resources,” he said. “Whether its AIB, ASB, GFF — it’s true with a number of the ‘acronym organizations.’”

To this effort, Quigg brings the wide breadth of experience with many of the industry’s leading trade groups he referenced, not just BCMA, where he was chair in the early 2010s. He is a past president of the Cookie & Snack Bakers Association (CASBA) and was the first baker to serve on the board of the Baking Equipment Manufacturers’ Association (BEMA). He also leads a company with a long and rich history.

A year shy of its 170th birthday, Richmond Baking is one of the oldest surviving companies in the United States. Established as a bakery in 1855 by David Hoerner, the business was known as Hoerner-Knopf when it was acquired in 1902 by a group of investors, including William H. Quigg, general manager of the business. Quigg was the great grandfather of the new ABA chair.

Renamed Richmond Baking Co. in 1903, the company baked bread, cookies and crackers distributed mostly on tea and coffee routes, Quigg said. In the early years bread was sold under numerous brands, including Cardinal and Honey Boy. Cookie brands included Blackstone and Butternut.

New plant opens in 1921

His great uncle Eugene Quigg was an ambulance driver in World War I and was called home to take over the business when William H. died in 2018. Bill Quigg credits Eugene for moves that lifted the business beyond its local reach. A decision was made to build a new baking complex in Richmond with two separate plants — one for cookies and crackers and the second for bread. The plant opened in 1921 and continues to operate today.

“He was a really a strong businessman and entrepreneur,” Bill Quigg said of Eugene. “He was very well connected nationally. He served on the War Production Board. At the time of his death in 1950, he was trying to put together a conglomeration of cookie/cracker businesses similar to Nabisco.”

Eugene was recognized as a leader nationally and was serving as president of the ABA when he died, and he was widely mourned across the industry:

  • “Only 54 at his sudden death, Mr. Quigg carved out a record of achievement in the years that were spared to him that is exceptional even among those favored with long life span,” this publication wrote in an April 1950 editorial.
  • An impassioned tribute by M. Lee Marshall, who was ABA chair and president of Continental Baking Co., concluded with, “He was as close to me as a blood brother. He leaves thousands of friends in and out of the industry who grieve his passing.”

While the event 74 years ago may seem ancient history to most readers, the episode was vividly remembered by a guest at this year’s ABA annual meeting — Eugene’s son, also named William. Now 90 years old, the elder William Quigg recalled the family was vacationing on the island of Jamaica in March 1950 when Eugene suddenly became ill. He was flown to a hospital in Miami where he underwent surgery but died three days later.

“It was my 16th birthday,” the elder Bill Quigg recalled. He said numerous industry leaders traveled to Richmond for his father’s funeral.

Focusing on cookies/ crackers

Around the time of Eugene’s death, Richmond Baking discontinued bread production and focused on cookie and cracker production. He was succeeded at Richmond Baking by his brother Robert, who led the company until his death in 1969. His son James R. Quigg Jr. took over and modernized the operation by installing bulk tanks for the storage of flour and sugar. Also during his tenure, Richmond Baking began producing graham meal and crushed crackers as an ingredient. The products remain a significant part of the company’s business today.

Bill Quigg, the company’s current president, has led the business since 2002 when he succeeded his father.

Quigg had worked at the company every summer from when he was 12 years old and continued working there while attending Miami University 25 miles away in Oxford, Ohio. He studied human resources in college and continued on at Miami for an MBA.

Quigg has been involved in industry affairs throughout his career and even earlier. BCMA meetings he attended while still in college with his father made an enduring impression. His father Jim “was always on the BCMA board” and served for a time as treasurer, Quigg recalled.

“He brought me along to board dinners as an alternate,” Quigg said. “The giants of the industry were there — the heads of Nabisco, Keebler and Pepperidge Farm. I was in awe. I remember being reluctant to join the conversation. The group was so impressive, but these are some of my fondest memories, at an early age.”

These early experiences occurred at a storied time for the cookie and cracker industry as the companies battled in what became known as “The Cookies Wars” in the 1980s when Frito Lay and Procter & Gamble entered the business with soft chocolate chip cookies. Additionally, a ferocious battle over the ownership of Nabisco was memorialized in the late 1980s book “Barbarians at the Gate.”

With those memories in mind, Quigg said he “jumped at the chance” early in his career when asked to become involved in BCMA. His first assignments included helping plan the group’s annual convention. Quigg was a past chair of BCMA when a merger of the group with the ABA was negotiated and executed. He served on an ABA/BCMA transition committee representing BCMA and working to effect a smooth integration.

Fortune 500 customers

Through its core business today of contract baking, Richmond Baking supplies numerous Fortune 500 companies.

“Not only is this business fairly stable from my perspective, our customer base focuses on marketing, which can be a lost art,” Quigg said.

While declining to share the names of Richmond’s customers, Quigg said examples include very large corporations that either do not own baking plants or rely on Richmond Baking for “overflow business,” among companies that do have bakeries.

In addition to the Indiana location, which has been a constant for Richmond Baking over its history, the company has operated other baking plants in the past. A new facility was built in McMinnville, Ore., and another was acquired and converted in Alma, Ga. Both were sold over the last several years in connection with the opening of the company’s new plant — More Than A Bakery, LLC,  a 225,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Versailles, Ky.

The new plant in Versailles was designed and built with a focus on food safety and people culture, Quigg said. It also intentionally is meant to be friendly on the eye.

“We are able to have food safety more in the line of meat/dairy than traditional bakery,” he said. “It is completely hygienically zoned. That’s where our niche is. One of our growth areas has been producing cookies for toddlers and small children.”

Baking cookies and crackers for school meal programs also is a large part of Richmond Baking’s business.

The plant was built on 112 acres of land in idyllic Kentucky horse country. A manmade pond excavated on the site was formed in the shape of the company’s logo. From the plant’s elevated levels of sanitation to the aesthetics of the setting and the facility, Quigg said the company is intent on inspiring the confidence of prospective customers — consumer packaged foods companies, putting their brands in the hands of Richmond Baking.

“The site was a former thoroughbred horse farm,” he said. “We are really focused on the first impression of customers, many of them Fortune 500 companies, from the moment they pull into the driveway.”

The company also offers research and development capabilities at the new plant.

“We plug the R&D capability in where our customers need us,” Quigg said. “There are some large companies that don’t have cookie/cracker R&D capability. We will talk them through concepts, and then we will provide samples and ideation for new products. Other customers will say this is the cookie or cracker we want, we just want your bakery to run it.”

A new family home

With the opening of the new plant in 2017, Quigg and his family moved from Indiana to Versailles, 160 miles south of Richmond (which, in turn, is 70 miles north of Cincinnati). His wife Felicia is Richmond’s vice president of family pride, heading the company’s human resources department.

The couple has three daughters -- Cailyn, Lorelei and Brecklyn. Cailyn has worked summers at the company while in high school.

Asked what his legacy will be at Richmond, Bill Quigg cited the Versailles plant and the installation of robotics at the Indiana plant.

“We’re just on the precipice of installing automation,” he said. “We’ve never had robotics at our company before. They literally got delivered last week.”

The project will automate the back end of the plant, from the removal of product from cooling conveyors through the wrapping process.

He said Richmond currently is in the process of equipment conversions and discussions with company associates “to make sure they aren’t worried about their future.”

The Kentucky facility currently operates two production lines, one for crackers and one that swings between cookies and crackers. In Indiana, Richmond operates two cookie lines and a single cracker production line.

The plant continues to operate highly efficiently.

“The crew there is very talented, and there’s a good likelihood we will continue producing in Indiana in the future,” Quigg said.