October 2006 Steady as She Rises A Florida deal is merely the latest success for one of Middle Tennessee’s most successful entrepreneurs By Hadley Hickman
Nashville’s “Bun Lady” is at it again. Cordia Harrington, CEO of The Bun Co.—a multi-million dollar enterprise that includes the world’s fastest automated bakery, a trucking line and a cold storage facility—recently inked a deal to become the permanent English muffin supplier to 781 McDonald’s restaurants across the state of Florida.
“This is huge,” Harrington says. “We have been working on this for four years now, and we’ve finally got it.”
Specifically, this means that Harrington’s muffin line will double in business, and her transport business will gain three extra loads a week to Florida. More importantly, says Mike Collins, president of 2nd Generation Capital, who works closely with Harrington, this new Florida business will “take her to a larger regional scale. Even though her buns go all over the place, this is making her a regional—and soon to be national—player. She’s now stepping out of her own backyard. Plus, it will add a lot of additional revenue and a lot of profit.”
Harrington’s entrepreneurial endeavors began in 1997 when she launched the Tennessee Bun Co. out of her factory in Dickson. Her bakery soon became the fastest automated bakery in the world, producing over 60,000 buns per minute.
While an impressive and lucrative accomplishment, she says the transportation of the buns from the bakery to the cold storage and shipment-packing facility (previously on Armory Road in Nashville) became too problematic.
“I had one too many trucks miss a deadline and got burned one too many times, which caused my reputation to be put at risk,” Harrington says.
Out of necessity and dissatisfaction, Harrington launched her own trucking company in 1999 merely to move the buns from the Dickson bakery to the Armory Road facility.
“I started Bun Lady Transport not because I was looking to acquire a trucking company but because I needed to solve a problem,” she says.
Having grown from one truck in 1999 to 48 trucks today, Bun Lady Transport provides its trucking services to numerous companies, including Nashville-based dining chain O’Charley’s, as well as Pepperidge Farm, Chili’s and Wolferman’s.
But Harrington didn’t stop there. In late 2005, she purchased Cold Storage of Nashville—a 72,000-square-foot freezer facility—as a way to ensure that her products arrive at the destination fresh and just as ordered.
“Again, I wasn’t out to purchase a large freezer facility,” she says. “The idea was presented to me, and I took it. And it has made things much easier.”
So where does the CEO of this multi-million dollar company go from here?
Collins says a logical step for Harrington would be to take her company out of her physical reach—meaning build a bakery in another geographic location that would enable her to better target and serve the many potential customers spread across America.
That’s not to say that opportunities in or around the Nashville area have dried up. And based on Harrington’s extraordinary track record, it wouldn’t be too surprising if she continued to find ways to grow her local business organically.
As Collins says, “this is a woman who has a lot of options.”
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