Pretzel City: How Reading Became the Hard Pretzel Capital of America

Reading's official nickname is the Pretzel City. That is not marketing exaggeration. For well over a century, Reading and the surrounding Berks County communities have been the center of the American hard pretzel industry, and the reasons for it are rooted in the same German-immigrant culture that shaped the city from its very beginning.

The German-speaking settlers who arrived in Berks County in the seventeen hundreds brought pretzel baking with them as a cultural practice, the way other immigrant communities brought sausage-making or cheese production. Pretzels were the bread of the German-speaking world, ancient in form and tied to religious tradition. In the Berks County German communities, home pretzel baking was common enough that it required no special explanation.

Commercial production followed the cultural practice. In nineteen thirty-five, a Reading company introduced the first automatic hard pretzel twisting machine, a mechanical innovation that transformed what had been a labor-intensive craft into a scalable industrial process. That machine made the mass production of hard pretzels economically practical, and the Reading area was already positioned to lead it.

Today the legacy still holds. Bachman Pretzel, Dieffenbach's, Tom Sturgis Pretzels, and Unique Pretzels all operate in the Reading metropolitan area. These are not small novelties; together they represent a significant share of the national hard pretzel market. Pennsylvania is widely reported to produce most of the pretzels consumed in the United States, and the Berks County corridor is the heart of that production.

The pretzel's shape, traditionally a symbol of prayer with arms crossed, became a symbol of this place instead. Walk into any convenience store or grocery within fifty miles of Reading and local pretzel brands are easy to find.