Muffin Makers Rise to Challenge, Battle for the Favor of Sweet Tooth

War is being waged in muffin land.

The craze for this newest snack food comes hot on the heels of croissants, cookies, ice cream, chocolate and other boutique-type foods.

Bakery patron, restaurant-goer, mall-shopper and street-stroller alike can hardly escape seeing a muffin in San Diego County. And muffin buyers face myriad decisions, from cinnamon chocolate chip to buttermilk raspberry to a wide range of fruit-filled bran muffins.

Battlers in the muffin wars are boutique-type companies like Marvelous Muffins, Muffin Break, Mrs. Beasley’s, and Lil’ Miss Muffins. You can even buy a Mrs. Fields Cookies muffin through Mrs. Fields’ subsidiary, La Petite Boulangerie. A muffin sells for 75 cents to $1.25 and weighs one-quarter to half a pound, making it not just a mouthful but a meal.

“Muffins are what croissants were 7 years ago and what cookies were 10 years ago,” said Ed Smith, owner of NE-MO’s Inc. in Escondido, which sells baked goods to convenience stores nationwide.

Image of Good Health

Smith said muffins are increasingly popular because there are more two-income families who eat out more often and because people are interested in buying higher-quality food products. Smith said the general emphasis on health has put the spotlight on foods, such as muffins, that are perceived to have fewer calories and more nutrition.

There is, however, another not-so-subtle force behind the muffin upsurge--what Smith calls the “Work-Out, Pig-Out Syndrome.”

“People who do a lot to take care of themselves also treat themselves for being good to themselves. That’s a big factor in San Diego,” Smith said.

When wholesaler Jody Eurman McLeod started Jody’s Muffin Company less than 10 years ago, the field was wide open. She started with a few accounts and now has about 50. Her muffin crews bake about 3,000 muffins a day--maximum capacity for her kitchen. Because of growing demand, McLeod recently signed a lease for a new kitchen.

“I was lucky it became a hot item,” she said. “At first, I was threatened by so many people (entering the muffin market), but now I’ve seen it’s just generated interest. It’s fierce competition. Some of the stores doing retail realize they can’t make it so they approach my market. It’s scary because it’s the only product I have.”

Competitive Climate

McLeod knows first-hand that the muffin battles are anything but tame.

“There are companies knocking on my clients’ doors all the time, approaching them with more flavors and less expensive muffins,” McLeod said. “The people I supply let me know when other muffin-makers approach them. When they try the new product, it hurts.

“I get calls all the time and I can tell the competition is checking us out,” she said, admitting she has done a little checking herself.

McLeod said people want to know what the muffins’ ingredients are, which is a subtle way of asking for a recipe. (A competing Muffin Break store in Escondido has its bakers sign a covenant promising they won’t take the recipe home, use it for their own advantage or sell it, owner June Lawrence said.)

McLeod said she often gets calls from housewives who want to start a muffin business. Although she would like to counsel them, McLeod is concerned about potential competition.

A newcomer to the market is called Dr. Bread. Bill Randoll, Dr. Bread’s chief executive officer, said the muffin market is “still fairly hodgepodge.”

“No one’s really exerted a strong presence in San Diego,” Randoll said. “But there’s some fairly intense lobbying pressure going on.”

Randoll said Dr. Bread, for instance, will try to sell its product in places where Jody’s Muffins are sold, such as the Pannikin cafes in La Jolla and Encinitas, and compete directly for muffin-lovers’ favor.

Saved by the Fiber Factor

Some muffin makers, such as Lil’ Miss Muffin in Mission Valley, capitalize on promoting muffins as “lite and healthy snacks” while offering such “sinful” flavors as butterscotch pecan, peanut-butter chocolate chip or mint chocolate chip.

Muffins do have one healthful halo and saving grace--fiber, an ingredient held sacred by the health-conscious. But even some muffin makers admit that stressing the fiber content might be overstating the case.

“People perceive muffins as a healthy, wholesome product, not like a doughnut or a Danish,” said NE-MO’s Smith. “My personal belief is that muffins are not wholesome. They have significant levels of sodium, fat and sugar. That combination is not different from a doughnut or a Danish.

“There is one better quality about a muffin: There’s more fiber in them than those other products.” Elaine Hiel, a nutritionist for the San Diego County Department of Health Services, said the nutritional value of muffins might be misleading, considering that bakers trend to build them the size of softballs.

“Although bran muffins have been advocated by nutritionists as an easy way to get more fiber in the diet, some of them are really sweet and sticky,” Hiel said. “The ones that are dry probably have less sugar and less fat. Unfortunately, some bakers are not educated in the area of what is low fat, low salt or sugar, and they’re giving the consumer the illusion that these are healthy for you.”

Hiel compares a cake doughnut, which weighs 25 grams, to a bran muffin, 40 grams; a blueberry muffin, 40 grams, and a slice of wheat-berry toast, 28 grams. The toast has 70 calories, the doughnut 105, the bran muffin 112 and the blueberry 126.

In fat content, toast has the least, with 1.1 grams; blueberry muffin, 4.3 grams; bran muffin, 5.1 grams, and the doughnut, 5.8 grams.

In sodium, the doughnut has 139 milligrams; toast, 148 milligrams; bran muffin, 168 milligrams and the blueberry muffin, 200 milligrams.

The doughnut has a trace of fiber; 0.2 grams in the blueberry muffin; 0.4 grams in the toast and 0.5 grams in the bran muffin.

But Are They Healthy?

“The real issue is, is the consumer going by what the muffin-makers are saying?” Hiel said, referring to some manufacturers that promote their product as a light and healthy snack.

“Muffins taste better than a piece of toast, people have gotten the idea that doughnuts are not good for you, they’re trying to find a replacement that is acceptable, and they’ve come up with the muffin,” Hiel said.

Another person who doesn’t like the idea of advertising his muffins as health food--despite the product’s name--is Jimmy Gibson, the man behind Dr. Bread. Gibson, who earned the name Dr. Bread when he worked as a baker in Colorado, has been called the Steve Jobs of the muffin industry by his peers. (Jobs is the co-founder of Apple Computer.)

“People think it will taste like dry, whole-wheat oats. Tasteless. That’s not my product. I don’t want to be associated with a hospital,” said Gibson, who lives in Oceanside.

The boom in muffin sales started in Canada in 1979. Toted as the “all-American food” by some muffin makers, popularity of the baked goods has been spreading across the United States ever since. Entrepreneur magazine calls the fast food one of the 10 megatrends in the country.

Muffins have been around for a long time. A recipe for muffins appeared in a 1747 cookbook; muffin “experts” say the bakery product originated in England, then spread to Canada, where today muffin shops are as ubiquitous as doughnut shops here.

A July report in Entrepreneur magazine said people are more willing to search for a better-quality muffin, hence the competition to be the best. McLeod of Jody’s Muffin Company said this is what gives her product the edge.

“There’s no reason for Jody to dismantle,” said Bob Harrington, owner of La Jolla Produce, which carries Jody’s Muffins.

“She’s got some good ICBM’s.”