Houston's oldest continuously used wholesale bakery site is on Washington Avenue, it trades under the Sunbeam name, and it belongs to Flowers Foods. That much is confirmed across four separate sources: the address, the phone number, the names Sunbeam and Schott's, and the Flowers link. Beyond those facts the account comes from a Houston retail-history site rather than the company, so this page attributes it: that site records Schott's Bakery being established by the Schott family in 1893, with Mr Schott baking at home and delivering by horse-drawn cart; contract baking from early on; Sunbeam becoming the exclusive brand as brands nationalised; a bakery thrift store opening in the 1960s, likely the city's first; and Flowers buying Schott's in 1981.
Whatever the detail, the shape is clear and it matches the pattern this directory has found in Dallas, Los Angeles, Baltimore and Philadelphia. The biggest name in the city's baking history is owned somewhere else, and what remains of the original site is an outlet store. Mrs. Baird's, which also had a Houston plant, belongs to Grupo Bimbo.
What is left that actually bakes wholesale is young. The oldest is Roland's Swiss Pastry, 1962. Then a long gap: The Bagel Shop Bakery in 1975, Arandas in 1993, Kraftsmen in 2001, Slow Dough in 2009, Panificadora Lempira in 2014, Magnol in 2019. Two of the biggest names on the page, Slow Dough and Cake&Bacon, are effectively products of the last fifteen years, and Cake&Bacon's co-owner trained at Slow Dough and at a Dallas bakery this directory also lists.
That youth is not a weakness for a buyer, it is a different risk. There is no century-old family house here to anchor a bread program on, and there are several companies that went from nothing to hundreds of accounts inside a decade. Slow Dough now claims over 500 wholesale accounts, buys 80,000 pounds of flour a week and runs 15 of its own trucks; Cake&Bacon claims over 450 restaurants, hotels and schools plus nearly 100 coffee shop pastry programs.