8 Pennsylvania Food Brands That Survived a Change of Ownership

Reuters reported in August 2026 that Flowers Foods, the Georgia company that has owned Tastykake since 2011, was hunting for a buyer for the Philadelphia snack cake brand.

Philadelphians weren’t surprised.

The brand has changed hands before, and so have many others across Pennsylvania.

These are the Pennsylvania food brands that have survived a change of ownership.

1. Turkey Hill’s Texas Owner

Turkey Hill Dairy has been in Lancaster County since the 1930s, when Armor Frey ran bottles of milk out to his neighbors from the back of a touring sedan.

The ice cream came much later, in 1980.

Many shoppers picture a Lancaster County dairy family behind the carton.

The picture is wrong.

Kroger held Turkey Hill from 1985 until 2019, then sold it for $215 million to a private equity firm many Lancaster County shoppers had never heard of.

In January 2026 the dairy put out two ice creams built on Entenmann’s cookies and brownies.

You can find them at Giant, Acme and ShopRite, churned in Conestoga under a label a Texas firm has held since 2019.

2. Tastykake’s 2011 Sale

Tastykake has fed Philadelphia lunchboxes since 1914, and the Tasty Baking Company that made them stayed a Philadelphia company for nearly a century.

That ended in May 2011, when Flowers Foods of Thomasville, Georgia finished buying it for about $175 million.

Fifteen years later Flowers went looking for an exit, with people close to the process putting the business near $350 million.

Reuters reported the number in August 2026, on a brand doing roughly $400 million a year in sales.

Philadelphians didn’t rush to defend the ownership chart.

They defended the Butterscotch Krimpets.

Whoever signs next inherits a lease, not a building.

Tastykake left Hunting Park Avenue for a purpose-built bakery at the Navy Yard in 2009, and Flowers has never owned that plant.

Bridge Investment Group paid $87 million for the building in May 2026, with nine years left to run on a 26-year lease.

So the Krimpets you buy keep coming out of South Philadelphia whatever the next owner pays.

3. Heinz’s $23 Billion Sale

Heinz’s food business started in 1869 in Sharpsburg, a borough on the Allegheny River just upstream from Pittsburgh.

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and 3G Capital bought the company in 2013 for $23 billion, then folded it into Kraft two years later.

A Pittsburgh ketchup company answering to Chicago sounds like the end of a Pittsburgh story.

It isn’t.

Kraft Heinz announced in September 2025 that it would break itself into two companies, with Heinz landing in the sauces-and-spreads half.

Then it stopped, pausing the breakup in February 2026 and putting $600 million into marketing and research instead.

You can buy the ketchup anywhere.

The stadium is another matter.

That name came down in July 2022 after 21 years, when Kraft Heinz decided a Michigan insurance broker was paying more than the company could justify.

4. Snyder’s of Hanover Under Campbell’s

Snyder’s of Hanover has twisted pretzels in the same York County town since 1909, in a place that bills itself as the Snack Food Capital of the World.

Campbell’s agreed in December 2017 to buy Snyder’s-Lance, the pretzel maker’s parent, at $50 a share.

The deal closed in March 2018 at an enterprise value of about $6.1 billion.

A New Jersey soup company owns a Pennsylvania pretzel maker.

Hanover residents shrugged.

The town kept the water tower anyway.

What changed sat inside the plant, which now also turns out Late July tortilla chips and potato chips for Kettle Brand and Cape Cod.

Campbell’s spent $72 million there in 2024 on six more potato chip kettles and 72 jobs, at a site employing roughly 950 people.

The bag of Snyder’s you grab in Harrisburg comes off a floor that fills Cape Cod bags too.

5. Utz’s Wall Street Detour

Utz has been making chips in Hanover since Bill and Salie Utz started the brand there in 1921.

The company reached the stock market late, arriving in 2020 through a merger with a blank-check firm called Collier Creek Holdings.

Four months later it spent $480 million of that new money on On The Border tortilla chips.

Then it decided Wall Street wasn’t worth the trouble.

In July 2026 the founding Rice and Lissette families agreed to a $2.9 billion deal with Germany’s Intersnack Group to take Utz private again.

The deal hasn’t closed.

Utz shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange while the two sides wait.

The company expects to finish in the last three months of 2026.

After that the families keep half the company, Intersnack takes the other half, and the business stays headquartered in Hanover.

Until then, every bag of Utz you buy comes from a company anybody with a brokerage account can own a piece of.

6. Wise Foods’ Mexican Owner

Wise Foods began when Earl Wise started frying potato chips in Berwick, Columbia County, in 1921.

His family ran the business for more than four decades before Borden bought it in 1964.

A string of private equity owners followed.

The last of them, Palladium Equity Partners, sold Wise in December 2012 to Arca Continental, which calls itself the second largest Coca-Cola bottler in Latin America.

Arca is based in Monterrey, and it consolidated Wise’s corporate functions in Atlanta after the deal.

The fryers stayed in Berwick.

Wise brought back Peppy the Owl in 2025, roughly 45 years after the cartoon mascot last appeared on a bag.

So the marketing comes out of Atlanta and the money answers to Monterrey.

The owl on the bag you pick up is back for the first time in four decades.

7. Stroehmann Under Grupo Bimbo

Stroehmann started in 1924, when brothers Carl and Harold Stroehmann bought a bakery on Washington Boulevard in Williamsport and put their brand name on it.

The brand later belonged to Canada’s George Weston Limited.

Mexico’s Grupo Bimbo agreed in December 2008 to buy Weston’s entire United States fresh bakery business, Stroehmann included, for $2.38 billion.

The name never changed.

Almost everything above it did.

Bimbo moved its United States headquarters out of Horsham to the Dallas area in 2026, after 17 years in the Philadelphia suburbs.

The Williamsport bakery on Lycoming Creek Road wasn’t part of that move.

Bimbo officials told the Williamsport Sun-Gazette in June 2026 that nobody at the plant would lose a job over it.

The Stroehmann loaf you pick up at Giant now comes from a Mexican company running its American bread business out of Texas.

8. Rita’s Four Owners After Tumolo

Rita’s Italian Ice began in 1984, when original owner Bob Tumolo started selling water ice in Bensalem, Bucks County.

He had one stand.

Tumolo was a Philadelphia firefighter, and the chain had passed 300 stores by the time he sold a controlling stake in 2005.

Four private equity groups have held it since.

The newest arrived in January 2025, when Dallas-based Maple Park Capital Partners bought a majority stake.

The Dallas money is aimed at the one thing everybody in Bucks County knows about Rita’s, which is that the season ends.

Maple Park wants drive-throughs and frozen custard through the winter.

A Peeps marshmallow flavor arrived in March 2026, and the chain is chasing 800 stores by 2030, up from roughly 605 today.

The cup you buy in July now has to earn its keep in January too.

What the Deals Cost

These food brands survived their new owners.

The buildings behind them didn’t always.

Kraft Heinz announced in November 2015 that it would shut seven North American plants and cut 2,600 jobs.

Allentown was on the list.

That 44-year-old Lehigh Valley plant made Grey Poupon mustard, A-1 steak sauce and Keurig coffee.

It closed in the summer of 2016.

Those 341 jobs went to Illinois, Michigan and Canada.

The Grey Poupon in your refrigerator is the same mustard it always was.

It stopped being a Pennsylvania product in 2016.

Grupo Bimbo had run the same arithmetic two years earlier.

Bimbo shut the Stroehmann bakery on Paxton Street in Swatara Township in September 2014, and about 84 people lost their jobs.