Magnolia Bakery is a New York City staple, thanks to its famous banana puddings and other decadent desserts. Then, after Carrie Bradshaw and her fellow Sex and the City characters sang the foodservice chain’s praises on the HBO show, it soon grew into a national obsession and a household name.

Expanding upon that notoriety, the brand began exploring the possibility of bringing the Magnolia Bakery into new territory, including retail shelves and food delivery services. To learn more, Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery connected with Eddie Revis, chief commercial officer for the company.

“Magnolia Bakery started as a single location in the West Village in New York City, right on Bleecker Street,” Revis relates. “That original location is still there, we still bake fresh, small batches every day on that location, there's a line every day, and you mentioned Sex and the City, and that is the location that Carrie expressed her love for Aiden while eating a cupcake sitting on the bench, and that has always been what we call like our original flagship bakery.”

The company expanded and added NYC locations, an outpost in LaGuardia Airport, and then opened restaurants in other states. Another ambition, Revis states, has been finding new ways to get their treats into consumers’ hands that didn’t necessarily involve opening more brick-and-mortar locations, but says, "We're still opening bakeries; we're still looking at those opportunities as they come up."

Three to four years ago, Revis says, the company started eyeballing foodservice partnerships with QSR companies, as well as retail launch ideas. First came its Banana Pudding Cookies, which put its most popular dessert in a soft-based, individually wrapped form, and next came its Oatmeal Raisin Cookies—the positive consumer response had the company feeling optimistic about future prospects. Revis says the team also started eyeballing ways to get their signature banana pudding into more places. 

“We started experimenting with our frozen bakery assortment; we started testing cupcakes, and our frozen banana pudding,” he recalls. “It was just me and a very small team, working with our key customers, working with relationships we already had in wholesale and CPG, and saying, ‘Hey, you took our cookie—how do you feel about a cupcake?’ Or, ‘How do you feel about a frozen banana pudding?’”

The company, Revis says, put a great deal of thought and effort into non-traditional retail, making sure their ventures and products played into its position as a premium, high-quality, and indulgent dessert purveyor.

That doesn’t mean the brand isn’t up for fun. Recently, Magnolia partnered with edibles brand Incredibles on a line of infused candies, available on the East Coast. In April, it announced a collaboration with food delivery outfit GoPuff that enables sweet-toothed consumers to get exclusive cupcakes brought right to their door. Just in time for 4/20 (a date traditionally associated with THC consumption), they introduced the first cupcake: the Puff’rnutter, a vanilla and chocolate cupcake topped with peanut butter frosting and featuring a marshmallow center. The partnership is part of GoPuff’s The Bakery, an initiative to increase the number of tempting baked treats and brands available to consumers. 

“As GoPuff continues to innovate and think about how they want to launch into this new category of bakery with baked goods that make every little moment sweeter, there's no better brand to do it than us,” Revis states. “We're really excited about this partnership with GoPuff because it solidifies our place and success in driving a non-traditional retail growth strategy with packaged product.”

Revis says while Magnolia Bakery’s retail locations will continue to be the primary focus of its efforts, it will continue working to explore new paths, like offering single-serving cups of banana pudding to first-class passengers on United Airlines, and taking its presence to new heights.. 

“We dream of taking Magnolia Bakery to more places,” he says. “It's in grocery stores, more bakeries, and now it's also in the sky,” he says. “With that ambition and the great team that we have here, it kind of becomes wherever we want to go next.”

Related: Magnolia Bakery debuts frozen-to-thaw Banana Pudding