If you’re of the age that you can remember walking through a mall in the ’80s and smelling freshly baked cinnamon rolls, there’s a good chance you are remembering T.J. Cinnamons. This chain was acquired by Arby’s in 1996, but it was founded a whole decade before that by Ted and Joyce Rice in Missouri and Kansas. The couple started their journey selling gooey cinnamon rolls from a humble mobile bakery, and soon they had a permanent storefront at Ward Parkway Shopping Center in Kansas City. Back in the 1980s, TIME magazine named the brand among the pioneers of what was quickly becoming the shopping mall cinnamon roll boom, while Missouri Life magazine went on to describe T.J. Cinnamons as a key player that once made Kansas City “the center of the cinnamon roll universe.”
Why Arby’s would want to buy T.J. Cinnamons
When a chain like Arby’s acquires a chain like T.J. Cinnamons, it is, of course, not for the love of cinnamon rolls alone. There was a strategy behind the move. Company reports suggest that Arby’s thought that co-branded locations, with T.J. Cinnamons bakery counters inside its fast food restaurants, would bring in more customers during early hours and snack times. This was because with T.J. Cinnamons and its line of cinnamon rolls and coffees, the chain would be able to offer a product for these hours that its iconic roast beef sandwich was less suited for. And it wouldn’t be the last fast food chain to serve cinnamon rolls either.
However, the growth didn’t quite play out as imagined. The brand has all but faded into obscurity, replaced by the global domination of some of its competitors, like Cinnabon. Interestingly, however, the founder of Cinnabon, Rich Komen, had attempted to get the T.J. Cinnamons’ franchise rights for the West Coast. When he failed, he launched his own cinnamon roll brand instead. It’s fascinating to think that had Komen managed to purchase the franchise rights for T.J. Cinnamons, we may have been looking at an entirely different cinnamon roll landscape today. So if you happened to have enjoyed a T.J. Cinnamons bun yourself back in the day, now you know this seemingly obscure bakery counter actually had a rich history as one of the earliest pioneers of the cinnamon roll boom…