Thursday, September 12, 2024
Continued from previous week
Seroogy’s tradition does not end with their recipes, the company’s dedication to the community and small-town, family environment remains in homage to those early years.
“We liked the people part of the business,” explained co-owner Joe Seroogy.
“At any given Christmas, you see everybody in town at one time. They come in, and my father loved it, and he would see kids who are now parents and grandparents that we went to school with.
“That’s real nice. You don’t get that kind of thing at the supermarket with a checkout, or any other place. Restaurants, maybe, it depends on the type of business. But for us, it’s part and parcel of being here. Everybody comes here at Christmas and Easter, and it’s very social. And everybody knows everybody and it’s a fun time.”
Seroogy said that the current employees are much like family.
“They’re all wonderful, wonderful people,” he said. “We laugh a lot; we have fun.”
And employees are at the heart of one of their largest “seasons” of the year.
“We have divided the year into three main sections — there’s Easter, there’s Christmas, and there’s the in-between stuff, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day things — but the main ones are Easter, Christmas and Valentine’s Day,” Seroogy said.
“Well, along comes June, and like Hughes Candy in Oshkosh locks up for June, and they don’t open again until September.
“We don’t like to do that, because people coming through want the stuff and take it when they go up north to vacation and they come back here, they’ll stop and pick up stuff and bring it back home for the family.
“For us, it has to be a 12-month business. It’s just not worth it for us to go through liquidating all of our stuff and getting rid of it and reducing it just so that we don’t have to have stuff hanging around. So we created a fourth season, which for us is candy bars.
“When summer would come we would have to lay off or replace a lot of people who wanted 12-month employment. But if you’re closing because of production, they’re going to find other places to go, and it’s easier for us to keep something going so that they have a job 12 months out of the year. And that’s why we have candy bars because we had to create, in essence, a fourth season.
“The kids come back from school, from vacation, and there is energy and they’re excited and that’s the best time to get them to sell candy bars for the playground equipment or the new band uniforms or something. And that’s one of our biggest seasons, biggest sellers of the years when school starts up again.
“When the Memorial Day parade hits, we have about 30 kids that help us out, giving out the candy bars — like 30,000 of them — and they love it.
“I always put them in back of one of the bands — De Pere or West De Pere bands — so we can establish a friendship with them because they sell our candy bars when they need uniforms or instruments or something. It’s a great thing.”
Today, Seroogy’s operates two locations — one at 144 N. Wisconsin St., De Pere, and one at 784 Willard Dr., Ashwaubenon, which opened in 2008.
Seroogy’s will be hosting a 125th anniversary celebration on Sept. 28, noon to 3 p.m.
For more information, visit https://seroogys.com.
Many thanks to the De Pere Historical Society, Joe Seroogy and Marjorie Hitchcock for their assistance in researching this 125-year history.
