The often-maligned fruitcake has a loyal following thanks to a family business with a just-right recipe.
BY KURT DUSTERBERG
No matter how you approach Southern Supreme Fruitcake & More on your drive, you encounter long stretches of rambling countryside. This section of southwestern Chatham County is the kind of deep country where many roads are identified by four-digit numbers, while others are marked by someone’s first and last name.
Just when you wonder if you’ve lost your way to Bear Creek, the sprawling store appears along the roadside, bringing a sense of relief: Ah, here it is!
“I told Daddy when we built this, nobody’s going to come this far out in the middle of nowhere to buy anything,” says Randy Scott, one of the members of the family who owns the business. “Thank God he proved me wrong.”
That was 35 years ago—five years after his mother, Berta Scott, had an idea for a business.
“I had a little beauty shop,” Berta explains, sitting on a stool at the back of the retail store. “I got this cookie recipe and I started making it into a cake and serving it to my customers. They really liked it. I told them, ‘One day I’m going to quit doing your hair and start making my fruitcake.”
Berta’s dream seemed fanciful 40 years ago, but today Southern Supreme makes more than 220,000 pounds of its Old Fashioned Nutty Fruitcake at its 40,000-square-foot facility. In addition to the company’s signature item, visitors can also indulge in brittles, cookies, candies, cheese florets and jams. Nearly all the recipes were developed by Berta, who has recruited two of her four children into the business, along with spouses, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Randy has expanded the space nine times to include five kitchens, a warehouse, packaging and shipping space and the showroom.
Most people make the trek to Southern Supreme ahead of the holiday season, and the Scott family makes it worthwhile. By late August, the store is fully decorated for Christmas. A sampling room gets visitors’ taste buds up and running, and a tour of the kitchens only adds to the excitement of returning to the store. Peak season begins around October, when close to 125 employees handle the food preparation, packaging, mail orders and showroom sales. “About 90 percent of our business is the last eight weeks of the year,” Randy says.
Some of Southern Supreme’s charm is in its back story. Berta began making the Christmas confection in her daughter’s garage, where she fashioned a small kitchen out of old equipment and a pizza oven. A few local women would help produce 100 pounds of cake each day. “Then we came in at night,” Randy says. “We would move the cakes from my sister’s garage, just on the side of the road here, up to Mom and Daddy’s, and we would glaze, decorate and wrap them and put them in a box.”
The first big breakthrough came at a craft show in Raleigh in 1985. The Scott family made 700 pounds of fruitcake and sold all of it. “I would take the sample plate and stand out in the aisle of those craft shows and ask people to sample it. They’d try it and say, ‘What was that?,’” Randy says.
After five years in the garage, Berta’s husband, Hoyt, a paint contractor and stove builder, built the first version of Southern Supreme in 1990, right there along Hoyt Scott Road. Yes, Berta’s husband was one of those Chatham County notables with his name on a stretch of the highway. “The local fire department wanted to name the roads after people the residents knew,” Randy explains. “Everyone knew Hoyt. This was before we started the business.”
Randy addresses the question that many people have surely wondered. “I feel like it would probably be known as Fruitcake Road if they had known all this would happen,” he says.
As the calendar moves deeper into autumn, the crowds grow larger at Southern Supreme. Sometimes there are a dozen tour buses in the parking lot at one time, pushing the number of daily visitors to more than 5,000. Guests are likely to receive a greeting from someone in the Scott family, including Berta, whose cheerful personality is a draw of its own. As she walks with a guest past a baking rack of fresh pecan brittle, she is asked if she still enjoys sampling the product. “Every time I walk past it,” she says emphatically. “Quality control.”
The baking begins long before the store opens. The ingredients go through a process of cooking and stirring before they are shaped into cakes and pressed. The first fruitcakes of the day come out of the oven by 7 a.m. The kitchen produces 3,000 pounds of cake each day in preparation for the busy season.
The matriarch of the family is fully aware that fruitcake is widely disparaged by holiday lovers and foodies alike, who come armed with multiple complaints—it’s too dry; it’s too fruity; it has a weird texture. But when you’re the queen of fruitcake, you can ignore the naysayers. Berta figures she solved the issue for the masses.
“I tell everybody we took out the things they didn’t like,” she says. “If you put all those fruits together and they don’t blend, they have a terrible taste. We don’t put a lot of cherries in it because it clashes with a lot of the fruit. We have a lot of nuts. Southerners like nuts. Every once in a while, someone from up North comes in and asks, ‘Have you got a cake that’s got more fruit in it?’ I say, ‘No, we don’t.’”
Randy, who worked in the furniture and flooring industries before focusing on fruitcake, has also pondered the holiday hostility aimed at the family’s crowning culinary achievement.
“I get a little down-deep snicker when they say, ‘fruitcake?’” Randy says. “I say, ‘yeah, fruitcakes.’ It’s OK. It got me a nice boat.”
Southern Supreme has enjoyed increased sales every year, thanks to word-of-mouth publicity and a robust mail-order business. As for the fruitcake, the recipe remains the same as the original. The sugar, margarine and flour are complemented by pineapples, dates, raisins, pecans and walnuts. The finished product is firm and flavor-balanced, a noteworthy departure from holiday rivals. And while Southern Supreme owes its start to Berta and the humble fruitcake, it takes the whole Scott family to create an annual holiday tradition.
“Nobody thought we would be in the fruitcake business,” Randy says. “We found out early on that we could survive one another. You do what you do, and I do what I do. My mother and father, they wouldn’t stand for much fussing and fighting. We don’t argue. Everybody has a role.”
