Growing up in Shillington, near Reading, Jill Sturgis Thomas’s playground was her family’s pretzel factory.
“My dad would go in on a Saturday and he’d take my brother and I along, and we had free reign of the place,” she said. “We’d ride the conveyor belt. We knew where to grab a hunk of dough to munch on and where to catch a doughy pretzel from the belt before it went into the dryer and got crispy and crunchy.”
Although such actions would not be allowed today, they made for fond memories.
Five generations have continued the first commercial pretzel bakery in America started by Jill’s great-great-grandfather, Julius Sturgis, in Lititz in 1861. Jill will soon publish a book, “Twisted: Mindful Pretzel Consumption,” on Tom Sturgis Pretzels. The snacks are recognized by their logo of a smiling, black-hatted boy holding a salty pretzel.
Today the company is run by Bruce Sturgis, Jill’s brother. Their father, Thomas Sturgis, 85, still works full-time — he built a lot of the machinery and is in charge of the maintenance department. His wife, Barbara Sturgis, 84, works part-time. Their youngest son, Chris Sturgis, is a Life Flight pilot.
At one time the company sold three basic varieties: regular butter pretzels, beer pretzels and cheese-flavored. Now, with skinny and thick sticks, nuggets, wheels, barbecue, ranch and more, there are “oodles of flavors and styles,” Jill said, and the company is always experimenting. Not surprisingly, pretzels were a mainstay in the Sturgis family kitchen.
“There was not a time that we did not have pretzels in the cabinet,” Jill said, adding with a laugh, “Even other companies. We’d bring them home and try them and say they were no good.”
It can be a bit daunting to marry into such a family.
“I got heck today for eating Snyder’s,” joked Jill’s husband, Bob Thomas. “I said, ‘We’ve got to check out the competition, don’t we?’”
Still, even though pretzels aren’t his favorite snack — he prefers sweet over salty — Bob does favor Sturgis.
“I’m not just saying this, but I like theirs best,” he said. “A lot of the others are just baked dough. Sturgis pretzels have a good flavor.”
Part of that comes from the Sturgis baking process, including baking some of their pretzels on a soapstone hearth surface and focusing on quality.
“They’ve always paid attention to the ingredients over the years,” said Bob, who has worked 45 years in the food industry himself. “They don’t just buy the cheapest stuff. They get what they need.”
When Jill was old enough to actually help with the pretzels, she started “hanging out” with the woman who ran the retail store.
“She would put me to work packing pretzels,” Jill said. “Later my dad would slip me a couple of dollars and I’d feel like I really went to work that day.”
Thomas Sturgis believed his kids should help with all aspects of the business, so as a teenager, Jill cleaned bathrooms, scrubbed outside walls of ovens, climbed ladders to change light bulbs and worked on the packing line. Her brothers learned to bake, which requires lifting heavy loads of dough from the mixer into the hopper for the twisting machines.
“The mixing has been the same all down through the years,” Jill said.
Twisting has been the biggest renovation, from hand twisting at a top speed of about 40 pretzels per minute, to twisting machines that could twist 50-120 pretzels per minute depending on the type of pretzel, to extrusion, a machine similar to a Play-Doh press that makes 840 pretzels per minute, again depending on style and size.
Jill’s upcoming book delves into the Sturgis Pretzel history, including the original bakery in Lititz where thick windowsills in the cellar allowed early inhabitants to shoot muskets when under attack.
The book also covers the baking process of Sturgis pretzels, family lineage, favorite pretzel recipes and legends and traditions of pretzels. Jill’s mother had collected enough Sturgis information to make “a small museum in its own right,” which has been incorporated into the book.
Back when graphic design was all “cut and tape,” Jill used to help design the Sturgis pretzel bags. She still occasionally writes the blurbs on the back, and pretzels continue to be a mainstay in the family’s vacation home, owned collectively by the Sturgis clan.
“There’s always pretzels there,” Jill said. “We would not go there without bringing pretzels along. Always Tom Sturgis pretzels.”
Bob likes to joke with friends that he married a “pretzel heiress,” saying, “There’s a lot of dough in that family, but I don’t know how much cash.”
While business can be tough on family dynamics, the Sturgis members focus on their relationship over finances.
“The company’s lawyers are always amazed the family still gets along as well as it does,” Jill said.
While she and Bob like Sturgis’s super crunchy Crunchzels best, they both enjoy many of the other flavors as well.
“I do know that Tom Sturgis Pretzels are good,” Bob said. “If I’m going to buy a pretzel, that’s what I want.”
For more information, please visit www.tomsturgisprezels.com.
Family recipe
“This is what we always take when asked to bring a dessert to a party or picnic,” said Jill Thomas, great-great-granddaughter of the founder of Tom Sturgis Pretzels, Inc.
Strawberry Pretzel Dessert
1 ½ cups crushed pretzels
1 stick margarine, melted
¼ cup sugar
(1) 8-oz. pkg. cream cheese
¾ cup sugar
2 cups whipped topping
(2) 3-oz. pkgs. strawberry Jell-O
2 cups boiling water
(2) 10-oz. pkgs. frozen, sliced strawberries
Mix pretzels, margarine and sugar. Press into a 9 x 13” pan. Bake at 375 degrees for 10 minutes.
Blend cream cheese and sugar, then beat in whipped topping and mix well. Put on top of cooled crust.
Dissolve packages of Jell-O in 2 cups boiling water. Add frozen strawberries. (Do not thaw them.) When this starts to set up, put on top of creamed mixture.
Refrigerate until serving time.
Variation: May use raspberries in place of strawberries.
