Millie Ray's serves orange-iced goodness

It started with a simple Hollywood Garden Club meeting.

On Millie Ray’s turn to bring refreshments, the young mom picked up a recipe she had for orange rolls. Using orange zest for the filling and icing, she baked them in muffin tins and added a few twists of her own. She’ll admit she does have a tendency to try new recipes for guests, after all.

The rolls met rave reviews at the meeting, and Millie walked out with her first order for more. That was 1979. 

As her sons were growing up, Millie sold real estate, but at Christmas time, she was in the orange roll business. Sons Ryan and Ben, who attended Shades Cahaba Elementary, remember their house being filled with towel-covered trays of rolls their mom had set out to rise during the holidays.

Decades later, Millie makes the recipe the same way, only now it reaches far beyond Homewood. 

In 2008, her sons, who were then running a Zoe’s Kitchen in Atlanta, had the idea to turn her popular rolls into a larger-scale business — called Millie Ray’s, of course.

The Rays started off visiting 10 mom-and-pop stores in the Atlanta area with sample cases of orange rolls along with cinnamon rolls and yeast rolls — all made with the signature yeast dough. Within two weeks, most of those stores were placing orders, and six years later, they still receive a regular supply of the frozen rolls along with at least 200 other retailers in Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, the Florida Panhandle, Mississippi and Louisiana.

Some of the initial success of Millie Ray’s rolls came just down the street from where they originated. The Homewood Piggly Wiggly was the first grocery store to carry the rolls. 

When Urban Cookhouse owners David and Andrea Snyder, friends of the Rays, were taste-testing recipes before opening their first restaurant, they sampled Millie Ray’s orange rolls and decided they wanted them on their menu.

In the early days, Ryan would deliver the orange rolls in a cooler in the back of his truck. Today, Urban Cookhouse serves around 9,000 of Millie Ray’s orange rolls at its three locations and is the only restaurant to call them by their full name on the menu.

Millie finds that often at grocery store tastings, people say her rolls taste like the orange rolls from Urban Cookhouse — only to learn that they are one and the same. Or, if they are already familiar with the brand, they want to know if she is really Millie Ray.

Birmingham-based food distributor Wood Fruitticher would later take over Ryan’s delivery role, allowing him to focus on operations and finances for the business. Now he spends his days working alongside his parents and Ben, now an Edgewood resident who oversees sales and marketing for Millie Ray’s. If Millie isn’t out holding roll demonstrations in grocery stores, she is helping at their production facility from 6 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. daily.

“Working as a family is one of the hardest, and most rewarding, things you can do,” Ryan said.

As of the past year, Millie Ray’s rolls are sold in 120 Winn-Dixie stores, and the orange roll is in 300 HoneyBaked Ham stores. Their daily production is now up to 14,000 orange and cinnamon rolls and 5,000 yeast rolls a day, and they are currently looking at real estate for a new production facility. Next up, they want to get the rolls in Publix and Food City stores.

That might not be surprising, given how people have confessed to Millie their addiction to the rolls over the years. One man said he had eaten a whole pan of 12 sweet rolls. Others share photos of their rolls eaten warm with ice cream or claim they find security in having trays of rolls in the freezer — many of them in the streets surrounding the home where the now-famous orange rolls were born.

To learn more, visit millierays.com.