Our Story
Growing up in a southern family of 10, my mother allowed me the freedom to cook for our family and experiment with food. I made dinners for my family of 10 starting at the age of 12. My mother made wonderful southern meals. Although I loved to cook, I would take a detour in my life into nursing before having a business involving cooking.
The first year Michael and I were married, I made pumpkin bread for presents (I still make this recipe in our shop to date). My thrill of newly married cooking was halted when Michael came to me and said I would have to stop all this baking and cooking because our electric bill had risen from $12 to $16 (that was 1970). My enthusiasm for baking and cooking was hardly dampened by an increase in our electric bill. I baked for every occasion: church, school, family, even a kindergarten reception for 600 people. In 1986, I started making sourdough bread and was thrilled. From the sourdough bread came loaf bread, herb bread, cinnamon rolls, dinner rolls, and breadsticks. In 1992, Michael retired from the phone company and we were destined to make our journey north from Florida to have four glorious seasons of Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter as opposed to two seasons of Hot and Hotter. We had traveled through Tennessee a number of times on Michael’s telephone company business trips and thought Tennessee was just beautiful. We moved to Waynesboro, Tennessee in 1992, and the following year, Michael encouraged me to open a bake shop. October 4th, 1993 our first shop was born: The Itty Bitty Bake Shop.
It was a lot of hard work with more trial and error, but this supportive community of 2,100 bought our product. It was there that we decided to change our focus from baked goods to serving lunch. Through more trial and error, came our Itty Bitty Sandwich Shop rolls. We had our shop for about 4 years when Michael took a position with the postal service in Nashville. We sold our business and headed to Hendersonville.After living in Hendersonville 4 years, we found this wonderful building on Main Street and were fortunate to put our business in it. March 26th, 2001, the Itty Bitty Bake Shop was reborn.
In 2005, we decided that our name did not reflect our true business, which was boxed lunches. We then changed our name to Itty Bitty Sandwich Shop. Our whole family has been involved in our business and our goal is to offer homemade food from scratch. In both of our businesses, we have been so fortunate to have the best customers imaginable. We have had wonderful employees. We are thrilled to have our business and are so thankful that Waynesboro and Hendersonville have supported us in such a tremendous way. After 11 years of business, we still so enjoy what we do.