Louisiana Once Owned These Iconic Brands. Here’s What Happened to Every One of Them.

LAFAYETTE, La. — When a Louisiana original disappears, it takes more than a product with it. It takes the Saturday morning it was tied to, the grandparent who bought it for you, the smell of the store where you found it. Louisiana has lost more of those than most states care to count.

Some of the losses were products. Some were stores. Some were beers, sodas, and bakeries that had been feeding the state since before World War I. Here’s where they went.

The Bakery That Put the Baby in the King Cake

If you grew up in metro New Orleans any time between the 1930s and 2000, you know McKenzie’s Pastry Shoppes. It started in 1929, when Henry McKenzie opened a bakery on Prytania Street in New Orleans. Daniel Entringer bought the business in 1936 for $83 and kept McKenzie’s name on the door, because the man had a reputation worth preserving.

Over the next six decades, the Entringer family built McKenzie’s into an institution: roughly 50 locations across the metro area, 400 people on the payroll at peak. The products were not fancy. They were perfect. Buttermilk drops. Chocolate turtles. Blackout cakes. Jelly rolls. Petit fours. And, of course, king cakes.

Entringer is also credited with putting the first plastic baby inside a king cake, a now-universal Mardi Gras tradition that started right there on Prytania Street. He found a batch of plastic babies in a French Quarter shop and got health department approval to tuck one into each cake.

Chef Paul Prudhomme said it best when McKenzie’s announced it was closing. “It’s sort of like losing part of the family,” he told The Advocate. “Almost every neighborhood had a McKenzie’s. Their pies, their cakes and their pastries have been part of our tradition and family life for a long, long time.”

Declining sales, supermarket bakery competition, and health code violations at the central bakery pushed the Entringers to close the chain in 2000. A revival attempt in 2001 went bankrupt. Tastee Donuts acquired the name and some recipes and sells selected items at their locations. But there’s only one McKenzie’s, and it belongs to memory now.

The Beer That Tennessee Williams Ordered

Long before craft beer arrived in Louisiana, there was Jax. The Jackson Brewing Company opened on Decatur Street in the French Quarter in 1890, and for the better part of a century, Jax was the drink of New Orleans. Tennessee Williams wrote it into “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Mike Nichols and Elaine May wrote the TV commercials. At its peak, the brewery was the largest independent brewery in the South.

The Jax Brewery occupied four contiguous city blocks along the Mississippi River in the French Quarter. By 1954, Jackson Brewing had purchased exclusive rights to the Jax trademark nationally, making it the tenth-largest brewery in the United States. None of that was enough. National megabreweries squeezed the local guys, and in 1974, the brewery closed for good. The recipe passed to Pearl Brewing Company, then to Pabst. The building became a shopping mall.

For decades, Jax was only a memory, the kind people kept alive by retelling it at parades. Then in 2022, Port Orleans Brewing Company registered the Louisiana trademark for Jax and began producing a new version. By 2025, it was in hundreds of bars, restaurants, and stores across the metro area in vintage brown bottles, priced under $10 a six-pack.

It’s a revival, not a resurrection. For a lot of people, that’s enough.

Dixie Beer: A Century, Then Gone

Jax wasn’t New Orleans’s only homegrown brew. Dixie Brewing Company opened in 1907 on Tulane Avenue in Mid-City and outlasted Prohibition, bankruptcy, and the mid-century national brewing consolidation. When Hurricane Katrina destroyed the brewery in 2005, they kept the brand alive by contract brewing in Wisconsin.

In 2017, Saints and Pelicans owner Tom Benson and his wife Gayle acquired Dixie. Tom Benson died in March 2018 before the new facility was complete; Gayle carried the project forward. A new brewery opened in New Orleans East in January 2020. By November 2020, the brand had been renamed Faubourg Brewing Company. Then, in May 2024, Faubourg announced it was closing.

New Orleans’ oldest brewery opened in 1907. It was gone by 2024. The Dixie Beer that survived Prohibition, Katrina, and a decade of contract brewing in the Midwest couldn’t survive private equity.

Schwegmann’s: Where New Orleans Made Groceries

There are New Orleans institutions, and then there is Schwegmann’s. The chain opened its first store in 1869 and grew into a grocery empire that rewrote how the city shopped. Schwegmann’s invented the local big-box retail experience: self-service shopping, direct distribution, pharmacy counters, bakeries, bars, banks, all under one roof. Stores so large that first-timers walked in and just stopped.

The Schwegmann’s advertising jingle became a New Orleans cultural artifact: “Saving money with a smile, makin’ groceries Schwegmann style.” Grocery shopping was supposed to be a chore; Schwegmann’s turned it into a destination. They sold draft beer you could drink while you shopped. They put their political opinions on the grocery bags. They had in-store bars.

By the late 1980s, Schwegmann’s held 36 to 38 percent of the greater New Orleans grocery market. Aggressive expansion in the early 1990s, mounting debt, and the arrival of national competitors ended it. The chain went bankrupt in the late 1990s. At its peak, it had 18 locations and 5,000 employees.

The original St. Claude Avenue location is now on the National Park Service historic registry. A T-shirt bearing the Schwegmann’s logo sells online. That’s what’s left.

K&B: The Purple You Never Forgot

K&B sold food, but what it sold best was a feeling. The Katz and Besthoff drugstore soda fountain was a neighborhood institution, and K&B’s house-brand gin became a staple of certain New Orleans cocktail hours that people still talk about today. The chain opened its first store in 1905 and eventually grew to 186 locations in six states.

What set K&B apart was the color. Sydney Besthoff’s wife reportedly bought surplus purple wrapping paper at salvage prices, and K&B purple became one of the most recognized brand colors in Louisiana history. It was on shopping carts, employee uniforms, and the store’s own liquor bottles. To this day, “K&B purple” is a recognized descriptor in New Orleans English.

K&B sold to Rite Aid in 1997. Rite Aid pulled Coca-Cola from the shelves. They cleared out the brand-specific inventory. They stripped the stores of everything that had made K&B, K&B. What they couldn’t touch was the sign on the old headquarters at 1055 St. Charles Ave., near Lee Circle, which kept the letters K&B on the roof for years after. People refilled old K&B gin bottles with fresh liquor just to put them on the bar at cocktail hour.

Hubig’s: The One That Almost Didn’t Come Back

Hubig’s Pies generated more sustained public grief than any Louisiana original in recent memory. Simon Hubig, a Basque immigrant and World War I veteran, founded his pie company in Fort Worth in 1922 and opened the New Orleans location that same year in a Faubourg Marigny factory on Dauphine Street. Every other Hubig’s location eventually closed. New Orleans held on.

For 90 years, Hubig’s hand pies in every flavor, apple, lemon, peach, pineapple, chocolate, coconut, lived in cardboard boxes next to the register at gas stations and grocery stores all across the city. The wrapper carried a smiling Simon the Pie Maker. They cost under a dollar for most of their existence. Before the 2012 fire, the factory was turning out 25,000 pies a day.

The fire that destroyed the factory on July 27, 2012, went to five alarms. The building was a total loss. For the next decade, New Orleans went without. In 2019, Drew Ramsey bought the brand. In November 2022, Hubig’s set up in the parking lot at Hancock Whitney Bank on South Carrollton Avenue and sold 10,000 pies in a single day. The next morning, Rouses opened its doors and customers were already in line.

They’re back. They cost $2.49 now, up from 99 cents at the end. And they’re worth it.

Elmer’s: Louisiana’s Oldest Candy Company Trades Hands

Elmer Chocolate, long billed as the oldest family-owned chocolate company in the United States, was founded in New Orleans in 1855 as the Miller Candy Company by Christopher Henry Miller. The company became Elmer Candy Corporation in 1914 and relocated to Ponchatoula in 1970. For generations of South Louisiana Catholics, Easter meant one thing: Elmer’s Gold Brick Eggs, Heavenly Hash Eggs, and Pecan Eggs.

The Heavenly Hash Egg debuted in 1923. The Gold Brick followed in 1936. Along the Gulf Coast, those two products outsold national Easter candy brands five to one. Elmer’s also produced Bubblets, peppermint candies that launched in the 1930s and were discontinued roughly 50 years later, and CheeWees, the New Orleans cheese curl that now runs as a separate company, Elmer’s Fine Foods, out of the Ninth Ward.

In 2025, the Nelson family, which had owned Elmer Chocolate since 1963, sold a majority stake to the Hoffman Family of Companies, a Florida-based conglomerate. The Nelson family retained partial ownership and leadership, and the product line is set to stay the same, with plans to expand from seasonal to year-round availability. But after nearly 170 years, Elmer Chocolate is no longer Louisiana-owned.

The eggs are still in stores. The company is still in Ponchatoula. But it’s a different thing now.

Jax Beer’s French Quarter Neighbor: Regal Beer

It wasn’t just Jax. New Orleans was a serious brewing city for most of the 20th century, and Regal Beer, produced by the American Brewing Company, had a loyal following of its own. To survive Prohibition, American Brewing shifted to sodas, including one called Dr. Swett’s Root Beer. When Prohibition ended, Regal came back. By the early 1960s, the Chicago-based Atlantic Brewing Company had bought the brand and moved production to Illinois. Regal was still on shelves through at least 1970. Then it was gone. The old French Quarter brewery eventually became The Royal Sonesta Hotel.

Delchamps: The Gulf Coast Grocer Louisiana Counted On

If you grew up along the bayou in the 1980s or 1990s, you made groceries at Delchamps. The Gulf Coast chain was headquartered in Mobile but ran 118 stores across Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida by the time of its 1997 acquisition. Across Acadiana and down through Lafourche and Terrebonne, Delchamps was the grocery store. Locals remember the rhythm of it: Delchamps for groceries, Eckerd’s for prescriptions, Walmart for everything else. The holy trinity of 1990s South Louisiana retail.

Jackson, Mississippi-based Jitney Jungle bought Delchamps in 1997 for $213.6 million. Jitney Jungle itself had been sold to a New York investment firm the year prior for $400 million. Neither chain could carry the debt. By 1999, both were in bankruptcy. Winn-Dixie acquired most of the stores in 2000 and rebranded them. Delchamps was done.

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