How one tough cookie changed Portland’s culinary landscape

Being in the thick of the winter holiday season, you might have cookies on the brain. You might also be surprised to learn that the Beaver State once ruled the West in cookie and cracker production — but the story of how we got there is anything but sweet.

The scene: Gilded Age Portland. The city, still a burgeoning industrial port with fortunes rapidly won and lost, draws as much attention from would-be empire-builders as it does Oregon Trail emigrants. The roads may yet be muddy, but opportunity is definitely in the air.

This is why in 1882, Herman Wittenberg, a 22 year-old son of overlanders from Kansas, bought a half-interest in the German Bakery and Coffee House located at Southwest 3rd and Alder downtown. The company already did a brisk business selling pastries and cookies baked in-house, plus retailed crackers made by Portland’s first cracker company, Oregon Steam Bakery on Southwest 2nd and Ash, co-owned by Thomas Liebe.

Within a few years, Liebe and Wittenberg had a falling-out over the cracker retailing and cut ties, so Wittenberg had to start an additional company to keep the German Bakery supplied with crackers. Started in 1886 with financial backing from the Nicolai brothers, for whom the Portland street was named, Portland Cracker Company opened at Northwest 11th and Davis. A year later, Wittenberg sold his interest in the German Bakery in order to focus on building his new cookie and cracker empire — and maybe taking down his former business associate Liebe while he was at it.

A biscuit baron rises

Portland Cracker Company did brisk business, and it didn’t escape notice — soon business leaders were cooing at the speed with which Wittenberg began to dominate the market. Liebe was left with no choice but to retaliate; in the same ruthless practice later used by flour baron Theodore Wilcox, Liebe’s Oregon Steam Bakery cut prices down to bedrock in an attempt to freeze out its competition. Unfortunately, being loss leaders isn’t always the best strategy — the plan backfired miserably, and Portland Cracker Company summarily absorbed Oregon Steam Bakery, just two and half years after rolling out its first sheets of crackers.

Portland Cracker was humming right along, but its cookies were just as popular as its saltines. An 1887 sales book from Portland Cracker Company listed the popular cookies and confections of the era: lemon snaps, Jenny Linds (a caraway-spiced sugar cookie named after the 19th-century opera soprano called the “Swedish nightingale”), picnics (a snickerdoodle-style cookie with a raisin dotting the center), ginger snaps, fruit biscuits (crispy sugar cookies with candied orange peel), vanilla bars, coconut taffy and knicknacks (a sugar cookie flavored with sour milk and lemon oil). Broken cookies could be purchased at a discount, sold for “two bits” (25 cents) until the mid-20th century, when the company began grinding the bits and incorporating them into new cookies.

In 1891, after moving into a spanking new brick building on 11th and Davis, Wittenberg began swallowing up smaller cracker and cookie companies across the region, including several in Washington. He ran Washington Cracker as a separate company, and took over Oregon Cracker Company on Northwest 6th and Glisan, eventually turning it into a macaroni factory.

Related: Why people all over the world love Oregon-grown wheat

These takeovers began a sort of West Coast snack war, and soon confectioners in San Francisco were helping Wittenberg’s competitors to try to take him down. He resorted to diversification, barging into the candy-making business. He bought out the (steam-powered) Seattle Steam Candy Company in Seattle and the Bernheim-Alisky Candy Company in Portland, the two largest candy-makers in the Northwest. Mass-marketed potato chips were still a couple decades away from store shelves or he’d have likely made a name selling those, too.

Although his expansion tactics may seem aggressive, some maintained that the quality of Wittenberg’s product was the real secret of his success. A writer for “The West Shore” magazine gushed in 1888 that “[w]herever one may go in the northwest, … its brand on a box is a guarantee that the contents are equal to the best made anywhere in the world.” Portland Cracker was shipping so much of its product overseas that one enterprising go-getter found it an ideal cover for smuggling large shipments of opium to Honolulu in 1896.

By 1899, Wittenberg had expanded operations all the way from Alaska to Mexico, merged Portland Cracker Company with the Pacific Coast Biscuit Company, and soon Pacific Coast Biscuit controlled 95% of all the cookie and cracker business west of the Rockies, in what became known as the Cracker Trust. This put them on the radar of bigger companies outside of the region, but not in a good way.

In 1914, National Biscuit Company (or as we know it today, Nabisco) sued Pacific Coast Biscuit for unfair competition and copyright infringement; Pacific Coast Biscuit’s logo — a red box with clipped corners — bore an uncanny resemblance to Nabisco’s. (In 1930, Nabisco ended up buying Pacific Coast Biscuit anyway.)

Pacific Coast Biscuit nonetheless sallied forth, and over time even more baking businesses were folded into the Wittenberg baking empire. The now-nationally known Grandma’s Cookies had been in Portland since its inception in 1914, and Wittenberg’s son Ralph bought Grandma’s in 1945 after the founder retired, churning out ginger snaps, vanilla sandwich cookies, chewy molasses, oatmeal-raisin and chocolate chip cookies for nearly three decades. A four-alarm fire claimed the building at the corner of North Williams and Broadway in 1970, and the company relocated to Beaverton. In 1980, under the updated name Grandma’s Foods, the company was purchased by Frito-Lay Company, making the cookie matriarch a household name outside the Northwest.

The crash after the sugar rush

When it comes to bakeries, being the biggest, oldest or most famous doesn’t necessarily make it the best. Even Oregon’s major bakeries like Franz (which acquired numerous bakeries over the century) didn’t make cookies until 1994, when they bought Smith Cookie Co. in McMinnville and began mass-producing the “Soft Baked” line in their own Franz packaging. This seemingly innocuous purchase didn’t come without its own controversy — according to a court documents filed in 2003, Smith was already licensed to produce and sell the competing Archway brand cookies when the purchase took place.

And newer cookie companies aren’t immune from ruthless tactics and legal drama, either. Just look at 2023’s “cookie wars” between Utah-based Crumbl (which has 928 locations and sales exceeding $1 billion as of February 2024) and two of its smaller rivals, Dirty Dough and Crave Cookies. (Crumbl dropped the lawsuit with Crave and settled with Dirty Dough out of court.)

Today, you might find your new favorite cookie at tiny, independent bakeries like Xocolatl Bakery in Boardman, Medford’s Wild Flour Cookies truck or on the dessert menu of cozy neighborhood restaurants like Coquine in Portland (which makes only one type of cookie — a superlative chocolate chip that will set you back $43 for a dozen). While Portland’s doughnuts are far more likely to take the spotlight than cookies, that could soon change. In the same Wild West spirit that made a stop at Voodoo a required Portland pitstop, it may take a maverick personality and outside the (pink) box thinking. And once again, it could be Grandma’s cookies that reign supreme.

A new cookie countess approaches?

Wielding a cherished family recipe, 10-year-old Sherwood resident Mary Foster took first place in the cookie category of the 2024 Oregon State Fair’s Junior Baked Foods competition with her “Grandma Conrad’s sugar cookies.” Taught to her by her mother Amanda Bott, Foster has been perfecting her great-grandmother’s recipe for about five years and has her technique down pat.

Don’t let her elfin stature or rosy-cheeked visage fool you — Foster has proven to be a worthy adversary with the ice-cold blood of a shark running through her veins. Sure, she may be young, but she’s literally been baking for half her life. She also happens to share many traits with the likes of Gilded-Age captains of industry like Carnegie, Vanderbilt and Rockefeller: She works hard, has a clear vision, and got started in the biz while only a child. Many of the world’s most successful corporations started as small family enterprises, and with grit like hers, she could easily become the next Mrs. Fields (who got started at age 13).

Claiming the blue ribbon on her very first attempt in a baking contest, her advice for would-be competitors is deceptively simple: “Choose a recipe you like and one that is pretty easy to make.”

Easier said than done, Mary Foster. Easier said than done.

Wisely keeping her cards close to her chest, Foster asked that OPB refrain from publishing Grandma Conrad’s winning recipe, so if you’re curious about how it tastes, you’re unfortunately on your own. That’s the way the cookie crumbles.

“Superabundant” previously covered the storied history of wheat in Oregon and how it put the state on the map as an epicenter of growing and shipping wheat, and how it even helped noodles become a Chinese mainstay. Watch the Wheat episode and learn more.

Portions of this story are adapted from Heather Arndt Anderson’s book “Portland: A Food Biography.”