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Business View Magazine
Ben’s Soft Pretzels
Turning dough into dough
The pretzel is a very old and very prized food. Legend
has it that pretzels were invented around 610 A.D., by
Italian (some say German, some say French) monks,
as a reward for children who had learned their prayers.
The twists in the baked, doughy morsel that have be-
come synonymous with the food, itself, supposedly
represented crossed arms – the traditional posture
for prayer. Over time, the custom spread throughout
medieval Europe and the pretzel’s three holes came
to represent Christianity’s Holy Trinity. Thus, pretzels
also became associated with good luck, long life, and
prosperity.
It’s entirely possible that that good luck and prosperity
has reached across the oceans of time and space and
landed, providentially, in Goshen, Indiana, USA. That’s
the corporate home of Ben’s Soft Pretzels and two of
its founding partners Scott Jones and Brian Krider,
who, in just seven short years, have taken the storied
food and turned it into a successful and thriving enter-
prise. Today, Ben’s Soft Pretzels is a leader in the soft
pretzel market, part of an industry that does over a
half-billion dollars in sales in the U.S., every year.
Pretzels originally came to the United States in the
