The Moving Story Behind the Creation of Auntie Anne’s Pretzels

Anne Beiler grew Auntie Anne’s into one of the world’s biggest international food chains despite having no business background or formal education beyond eighth grade. Courtesy of Anne Beiler

“Auntie Anne’s is a 21st-century miracle,” declared Anne Beiler, the founder of international soft pretzel chain Auntie Anne’s. Beiler called her business miraculous not for its speed of growth, nor its popular pretzel recipe, but for how it gave hope to others.

Auntie Anne’s was founded out of Beiler and her husband’s personal grief and despair. Through their healing process, they realized they wanted to help other couples overcome their hurdles by providing free counseling services. Auntie Anne’s was created in 1988 to fund that goal. “The reality of living out our vision has been surprising, stunning, and unbelievable,” Beiler said.

The first Auntie Anne’s stand in Downingtown, Penn. Courtesy of Anne Beiler

Breaking the Silence

An Amish-Mennonite couple, Jonas and Anne Beiler lost their 19-month-old daughter Angela in a terrible accident in 1975. Neither of them had a vocabulary for grief. “We grieved silently,” she said. The couple began to drift apart.

Beiler was relieved when her pastor invited her to his office one day to talk. “I was shocked because I was actually able to talk about how I was feeling,” she said. But then, her pastor took advantage of her and began sexually abusing her. “That put me into a whole other trauma. I call it the dark world.” The sexual and psychological abuse continued for nearly seven years, throwing her into a cycle of guilt and shame. “I weighed 90 pounds, I hated who I had become, and I thought Jonas would divorce me if he ever found out.”

Anne and Jonas Beiler on their wedding day, in 1968. Courtesy of Anne Beiler

One day, she felt she could no longer hold the anger and pain inside. She confessed to her husband about what was happening. So began a journey through which Beiler learned that “when you begin to talk, you start to set yourself free. I believe that the principle of confession is really about being freed. My advice to anyone who is grieving or despairing is to find someone you can trust completely and talk until you’re done.”

A Vision, and A Recipe

It took a long time for Jonas and Anne to become a happy, functional, and mutually trusting couple again. Their struggles inspired Jonas to help other couples. A mechanic by trade, he decided to study psychology in his spare time, to understand what happened in their relationship. Then, he began offering counseling, in a small way at first, in their home and local church. He always wanted his services to be free because he didn’t want people to worry about affording it. “He was so passionate about this calling, but he wasn’t making any money,” Beiler said. So, in 1988, she bought a stand at a local farmer’s market to help fund his vision and pay the bills.

Beiler grew up in an Amish family. Pictured here with her mother. Courtesy of Anne Beiler

As an adolescent, Beiler had been a passionate baker. She was entrusted by her mother to bake 60 to 70 pies from scratch every week for her parents to sell at the market. Jonas was also an experienced baker who helped his mother in the kitchen from an early age. They both had a natural instinct for knowing how to adjust baking recipes, such as for dry or humid days.

The pretzels on the menu of the original market stand were terrible. The couple began experimenting with the recipe. “We kept peeking in the oven, and they didn’t look anything like the other pretzels!” Beiler said. When the pretzels were ready, she and Jonas shared one and looked at each other in amazement.

Tessa Dilley

A customer came, bought a pretzel, and walked away. “We watched him,” she recounted. “He took a bite of the pretzel, stopped, looked at the pretzel, looked at the store, and walked back. He said, ‘What is this?’” And that was the start of Auntie Anne’s. “We never advertised in any of our years running the company,” Beiler said. “People just lined up.”

Within one year, they built two stores in Pennsylvania. “And then the next year, we built 12 stores, and the following year we built 35 to 40 stores,” she said. Over the next 18 years, the company spread across the country and internationally. Today, the franchise has nearly 2,000 locations across more than 25 countries.

Anne with her father Eli. Courtesy of Anne Beiler

Auntie Anne’s provided the funding for running Jonas’s counseling service, called Family Resource and Counseling Center, which operated until 2016 and serviced the greater Lancaster area. The company also supported local charities and causes, such as children’s hospitals, counseling programs, and community organizations—helping thousands of people over the years. “We were ecstatic about being able to give because we’d never been able to give much before,” she said. In the Amish tradition, children attend school until the eighth grade. “We had no plan, no formal education, and no money,” said Beiler. “We believed that God had called us to be light, and we brought our faith into the workplace,” she added.

Wherever she and Jonas traveled, she envisioned Auntie Anne’s stores everywhere. But she had no idea how to turn that into a reality. At first, she didn’t know what franchising was or how to deal with the legalities. But she believed strongly in her product, her purpose, and her people—including by recruiting her brothers, who had more business experience, to help her develop the company.

She wanted everyone walking past her store to try a pretzel, just to experience what a good, freshly baked pretzel tasted like. Thus, she built sampling into the franchise agreement—requiring all franchisees to do it at their stores. When pressed to do conventional marketing on television, she refused, believing that the key to growing sales was sampling.

A recent photo of Beiler and her husband Jonas. Tessa Dilley

The Power of Telling Your Story

Beiler’s path out of darkness inspired her to create a platform to help other women tell their stories. In 2009, she created a program called STORIESx8. In each cohort, eight women would gather weekly for eight weeks, to tell their stories without interruption, and thereby experience the freedom that comes from confession. “One 78-year-old woman came, so shy that she sat in the furthest corner with her head down,” she recalled. “At the end of week six, she said to me, ‘I think I might be ready to tell my story, but I can’t say it. Can I write it?’” The lady was unable to read her story without tears, so Beiler offered to read it on her behalf. “Her story was incredible,” Beiler said, without divulging details due to the private nature of the story. The following week, the lady came in with her head held high and said, “I have had the best week of my life!” Though Beiler no longer personally runs the program (it is still available in churches and small communities), she devotes her time to speaking events where she encourages people to lift their burdens by telling their stories truthfully.

Beiler sold the company in 2005, wanting to take a break to focus on her family. She still can’t believe that she built such a big brand from scratch. The Auntie Anne’s miracle “is about how God intervened for us at very critical times,” she said.

Tessa Dilley

This article was originally published in American Essence magazine.