Savage’s Bakery

Savage’s Bakery has been baking in the Birmingham, Alabama area since 1939, when William and Mrs. Savage opened the shop at the old Highland Plaza shopping center on Highland Avenue. The bakery has moved twice since then, first to Mountain Brook’s Crestline Heights Shopping Center in 1947 and then, by the 1950s, to its current home on 18th Street South in Homewood, just south of downtown Birmingham, where it has remained a fixture of the metro area’s food scene for more than seventy years.

Van Scott Jr. bought the bakery from William Savage’s widow in 1978 and trained under longtime baker Tommy Duncan to learn the business from the ground up, a hands on transition that helped keep the shop’s original recipes intact even as ownership changed. Scott stepped back from day to day operations in 2021, then returned to the bakery in 2024 at age seventy two, a decision that underscored how personally tied he remains to a business he has now run for close to five decades.

The bakery’s product line centers on breads, pastries, cakes, and pies made from original family recipes, along with a rotating cast of cookies that includes Meltaways and Smiley Face Cookies, longtime favorites among regulars. Butterflake Rolls and custom cakes round out the everyday offerings, and the shop leans further into seasonal specialties around the holidays, when custom cake orders and gingerbread men become a bigger part of the daily workload, sometimes requiring orders to be placed weeks in advance during the busiest weeks of the year, a pattern longtime customers have come to plan around each Thanksgiving and Christmas season.

Longtime employees are part of what gives Savage’s its continuity. Head baker Ben Cook has worked at the bakery for more than four decades, and Scott’s own daughters, Elizabeth and Margaret, have held various roles at the business over the years, a pattern of overlapping family and long tenured staff that is increasingly rare in small food businesses anywhere, let alone one that has stayed in a single Birmingham area storefront for more than seventy years.

The move from a general purpose bakery counter to a business known specifically for signature items, the Meltaways and Smiley Face Cookies in particular, happened gradually over decades rather than through any single rebranding effort, which is part of why those items now carry a kind of nostalgic weight for customers who grew up visiting the shop with their own parents. That generational customer base has helped Savage’s weather changes in Birmingham’s food retail landscape that have closed many comparable independent bakeries over the same period.

The bakery’s current location sits in the basement of the Stevens Building on 18th Street South, in a space that once held the Lowenbrau restaurant, a detail longtime Homewood and Birmingham residents sometimes mention as a marker of how much the surrounding block has changed since the bakery moved in during the 1950s. Because specific hours were not confirmed on the bakery’s own site at the time of writing, visitors are encouraged to call ahead before making a special trip, particularly around holidays when custom cake orders can affect walk in availability.

For anyone tracing the history of Birmingham area food businesses, Savage’s Bakery offers one of the clearest examples of a family recipe book outliving its original owners, passed from the Savage family to Van Scott and now sustained by a mix of decades long employees and Scott’s own family, still turning out the same style of cakes and cookies that opened the shop’s doors more than eighty five years ago, a run of continuous operation that few small food businesses anywhere in Alabama can claim.