Mother’s Cookies crumbles under materials, fuel costs

MotherÆs Cookies crumbles under materials, fuel costs Mother's Cookies, once a leading U.S. baked-goods manufacturer and maker of the ubiquitous pink-and-white-iced Circus Animal Cookies, abruptly closed its bakery doors over the weekend and parent firm Archway and Mother's Cookie Co. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in a Delaware federal court Monday.

Mother's Cookies well-known Circus Animal Cookies.

   Archway owner Catterton Partners, a private-equity firm in Greenwich, Conn., said in a statement they “took a number of actions to remedy” the current financial crises at the firm that had developed from rising raw materials prices and increases in the cost of fuel.
   'But these actions were not sufficient to overcome the losses and return Mother’s Cake & Cookie Co. and Archway Cookies LLC to profitability,' said the statement.
   Catterton had sought financing to alleviate Archway and Mother's financial plight, but to no avail. 'As you know, the credit environment is very difficult now,” a Catterton spokesperson told the San Francisco Chronicle.
   'Having reviewed the options available, the company believes that this (bankruptcy filing) was the only course of action,” Jeff Granger of Focus Management Group in Tampa, Fla., told the Chronicle. Granger is expected to be appointed chief restructuring officer of Archway.
   Citing an 'unforeseeable business circumstances' exemption, Catterton did not provide workers with a federally mandated 60-day notification of layoff. Financial tracking firm Hoover's states that the Archway/Mother's firm had 649 workers as of 2007.
   Mother's Cookies was founded in the California Bay Area in 1914 and spent nearly its entire baking history in Oakland before shifting its manufacturing and distribution facilities to Ohio and Canada in 2006. At the firm's height in 2002, it was producing 17.5 million cookies per day and distributing more than a dozen varieties throughout the United States.