The Astonishing Amount Of Cheesecake The Cheesecake Factory Sells Per Year
Given how popular the restaurant chain is, and given that it's in said restaurant chain's name, it should come as no surprise that the yearly amount of cheesecake sold by the Cheesecake Factory numbers in the tens of millions. Reader's Digest, citing an unnamed spokesperson for the company, puts that number at 35 million slices of cheesecake sold every year. To put that in perspective, that's roughly enough cheesecake to give out to every resident of the twenty largest cities in the United States.
Again, it's only fitting that a restaurant chain with such a name would sell so much cheesecake. But anyone who has been to the Cheesecake Factory will know that it's possible to go multiple times in a year, each time ordering several different items off its mammoth menu, and not even make it to the desserts, let alone the cheesecake.
That being said, when you do finally make it to the desserts, you'll have your pick from an impressively wide variety of cheesecakes. Currently, the Cheesecake Factory website lists more than 30 different flavors and varieties, ranging from cookie dough cheesecake to Cinnabon swirl, from raspberry truffle to good old fashioned original cheesecake. Even with many of these varieties getting regularly swapped out, and with more than 200 locations in the United States, one imagines it isn't difficult to sell such a massive amount.
All about the cheesecake
Technically, the Cheesecake Factory has had its focus on cheesecake before it was even a restaurant. Founded in 1972 after Evelyn and Oscar Overton moved to the Los Angeles area, the first location of the Cheesecake Factory wasn't a sit-down eatery but a wholesale bakery, technically far closer to the namesake.
As for the cheesecake itself, that goes back even further. The company's origin story has Evelyn perfecting a cheesecake recipe she found in the paper when she and Oscar were still living in their native city of Detroit during the 1940s. The popularity of her version of the recipe led her to start selling her cheesecakes to several of the Detroit area's best restaurants.
Though it would take about 30 years for the Overtons to make it out to Southern California, the cheesecakes would again prove popular. So much so that they couldn't be contained in a bakery alone. The Overtons' son David, who had joined the company in 1975, opened the first Cheesecake Factory restaurant in 1978 in Beverly Hills. According to the website, there was a line out the door on opening day. The second location came about five years later, growing to the 200-plus they boast today.
Cranking out a variety of cheesecakes
Though most of the lunch and dinner items on that huge menu –- from cheeseburger spring rolls to steaks to Cobb salads -– are cooked on site at most Cheesecake Factory restaurants, there is still, as it were, a "central" Cheesecake Factory. In 1986, the chain opened a 16,000 foot bakery facility in Calabasas Hills to bake and distribute to various restaurant locations. At the time, however, Cheesecake Factory only had a small handful of locations and was entirely located in Southern California.
The chain's quick growth across the country also naturally necessitated the company scale up quickly, and 1995 saw it open a new production facility –- also in Calabasas Hills. Measurements on that production facility come in at 60,000 square feet, more than three times the size of the original.
That single, albeit massive, facility is likely not responsible for every single one of the 35 million slices of cheesecake sold every year, though. Though most of its locations are in the United States, the Cheesecake Factory has restaurant locations as far-flung as Dubai, Shanghai, and Guadalajara, Mexico. We would imagine that in those cases, the cheesecake is probably made a little closer by.