Savannah is a city that knows how to hold on to a good story.
Its streets preserve centuries of architecture. Its squares keep history woven into everyday life. And when it comes to dessert, Savannah has developed another kind of memory—one measured in cookie tins, bakery cases, family recipes, flaky pastry, warm scones, and the unmistakable scent of pralines drifting through the Historic District.
The city’s sweet story is broader than any one signature dessert. It includes a cookie company that began near City Market more than a century ago, a neighborhood bakery carrying forward one of Savannah’s most nostalgic cookies, a modern pastry shop born from a crowdfunding dream, a bakery devoted almost entirely to scones, a Haitian-American baker whose work connects food and community, and two branches of a Savannah candy-making family whose pralines helped make Southern confectionery part of the visitor experience.
Together, these seven businesses show how Savannah’s dessert culture has moved from family kitchens and neighborhood bakeries into one of the city’s most recognizable forms of hospitality.
1. Byrd Cookie Company: A Century of Savannah in a Cookie Tin
Savannah’s modern baking story can begin in 1924, when Benjamin Tillman “Pop” Byrd Sr. started baking Scotch Oatmeal cookies in a small bakery near City Market.
He delivered them around Savannah in a Model T Ford, and the cookies were often sold from large glass jars for two for a penny. Their popularity eventually pushed Byrd beyond its first downtown location. In 1929, Pop converted a tin-sided barn in Sandfly into a larger bakery he called Byrd’s Famous Cookies.
What followed became a multigenerational Savannah story.
Pop’s son, B.T. “Cookie” Byrd Jr., took over after World War II. The company expanded again, developed its recognizable souvenir tins, and eventually embraced Savannah’s growing tourism industry by welcoming visitors for bakery tours. Later generations expanded Byrd into a larger regional and national brand while maintaining its Savannah roots.
The original Scotch Oatmeal cookie remains important not simply because it has survived, but because it connects modern Savannah directly to a small neighborhood bakery operating a century ago.
The Doughful bite: Scotch Oatmeal Cookie
2. Baker’s Pride Bakery: Keeping the Chocolate Chewie Alive
Some dessert traditions survive because the original business survives.
Others survive because another baker refuses to let the recipe disappear.
Baker’s Pride Bakery has been part of Savannah since 1982, producing cakes, pastries, doughnuts, and everyday bakery favorites from its DeRenne Avenue shop. But one cookie gives the bakery a particularly important place in Savannah’s dessert story: the Chocolate Chewie.
The cookie has roots in Gottlieb’s Bakery, Savannah’s historic Jewish bakery. The Gottlieb family’s baking history stretched back to the late nineteenth century, and the bakery became known for breads and sweets including challah, rye, rugelach—and Chocolate Chewies.
Today Baker’s Pride keeps its own version of that tradition alive.
The cookie has a thin, crisp exterior surrounding a fudgy, chewy chocolate center. Baker’s Pride produces hundreds of them on a typical baking day, supplying both its own shop and wholesale customers around the region. The family behind Baker’s Pride is careful not to claim that it invented the cookie; instead, it recognizes Gottlieb’s as the source of the tradition and sees its role as carrying that Savannah favorite forward.
That makes the Chocolate Chewie more than something good to eat. It is an example of how a local food tradition can outlive the bakery where many Savannahians first encountered it.
The Doughful bite: Chocolate Chewie
3. River Street Sweets: When Candy-Making Became Part of the Savannah Experience
By the 1970s, Savannah’s riverfront was beginning a new chapter—and a small family business would help make sweets part of the experience of visiting it.
River Street Sweets traces its beginning to 1973, when the Strickland family operated a small gift shop called The Cotton Bale on River Street. Candy entered the story almost accidentally after the family experimented with fudge. From there came pralines, Bear Claws, glazed pecans, divinity, peanut brittle, and other Southern confections.
More than five decades later, River Street Sweets identifies itself as Savannah’s oldest candy store and remains operated by second-generation siblings Jennifer and Tim Strickland. Its pralines are still cooked in copper kettles and scooped onto marble slabs.
But the significance of River Street Sweets is not only the praline itself.
The process became part of the attraction.
Watching candy being made, smelling warm sugar and pecans from the street, and tasting a fresh praline became woven into the sensory experience of exploring Savannah’s riverfront. In that sense, River Street Sweets helped turn dessert into something visitors could not only buy, but watch, smell, and remember.
The Doughful bite: Original Pecan Praline
4. Savannah’s Candy Kitchen: A Family Tradition Takes Another Path
Savannah’s Candy Kitchen belongs to the same extended Strickland candy-making story, but represents another chapter in it.
Stan “The Candy Man” Strickland opened the flagship Savannah’s Candy Kitchen on River Street in 1990, drawing on family recipes and the candy-making traditions he had known for much of his life. The company continues under members of the Strickland family today.
The shop became known for the old-fashioned spectacle of Southern candy: copper kettles, pralines, pecan log rolls, divinity, brittle, glazed pecans, caramel confections, and rows of sweets intended to inspire the same kind of nostalgia that shaped the business itself.
Including both Savannah’s Candy Kitchen and River Street Sweets in Savannah’s larger dessert story reveals something interesting. The city’s confectionery identity did not develop around a dozen unrelated candy stores. Part of it grew through one family whose traditions branched into businesses that became highly visible pieces of Savannah tourism.
For Doughful, that makes the overlap part of the history rather than something to ignore.
The Doughful bite: Pecan Praline or Pecan Log Roll
5. Unforgettable Bakery + Cafe: Baking With Purpose
Savannah’s dessert story is not only about businesses that have survived for generations.
It is also about bakers creating new traditions around community.
Unforgettable Bakery + Cafe has served Savannah since 2009 under baker and founder Belinda Baptiste, a self-taught Haitian-American baker whose approach connects cakes and breads with ideas of nourishment, family, and service.
Baptiste describes her baking as influenced by her Haitian-American roots and her interest in wholesome food. At the same time, Unforgettable has served as a base for work supporting local youth, young adults, and unhoused members of the community.
That combination earned attention far beyond Savannah. Baptiste was named a 2023 James Beard Award semifinalist for Outstanding Bakery.
Her place in Savannah’s dessert story adds something essential: the idea that a bakery can be both a place that produces memorable sweets and a vehicle for feeding a community in a much broader sense.
The Doughful bite: A slice of cake or one of the bakery’s signature sweet breads, depending on current availability
6. Auspicious Baking Company: Savannah’s New Generation of Pastry
A city’s baking culture stays interesting when tradition is joined by experimentation.
Auspicious Baking Company represents that newer chapter.
Katie and Mark—Pennsylvania natives who fell in love with Savannah—turned a crowdfunding-supported idea into a bakery in 2017. The business began with a Sundays-only model before demand pushed it toward a larger operation. It has since grown to multiple retail locations and expanded into breads, pastries, cakes, and a restaurant concept.
The bakery’s cases demonstrate how Savannah’s contemporary pastry culture has widened: croissants, cinnamon buns, cookies, breads, house-made pop-tarts, pies, and vegan pastries all share space within the Auspicious approach.
Its story is significantly younger than Byrd’s or Baker’s Pride, but that is precisely why it belongs.
Auspicious shows what Savannah baking looks like when the city’s established appreciation for handmade food meets a newer generation of bakers interested in lamination, unexpected flavors, vegan pastry, and constantly changing menus.
The Doughful bite: Croissant or seasonal laminated pastry
7. Savannah Scone Company: Building a Savannah Tradition From Scratch
Savannah Scone Company provides perhaps the clearest example of a business deliberately creating a new local specialty.
Founded in 2019 by Sara Graham, the bakery was later purchased by Beth Copic in 2025 and now operates two Savannah locations. Its entire concept revolves around handcrafted scones.
And not just a handful of flavors.
Savannah Scone Company says it has developed more than 200 scone flavors and variations, with a menu that changes throughout the week. The bakery makes its scones by hand each morning using ingredients that include Georgia dairy, locally sourced eggs and pecans, and Savannah honey.
The bakery has also created its own hybrid pastry: the Scuffin, a cross between a scone and muffin.
The business may not have a century of history behind it, but that makes its role interesting. Savannah’s dessert traditions were all new once. The city’s next enduring specialty could just as easily begin with a baker deciding that Savannah needed its own dedicated sconery.
The Doughful bite: Blueberry Scone or the house-created Scuffin
Seven Businesses, Several Generations, One Sweet City
Look at these businesses together and Savannah’s dessert story becomes much more interesting than a list of praline shops.
Byrd Cookie Company represents a century-old family baking business that grew alongside Savannah itself.
Baker’s Pride shows how one bakery can keep another generation’s recipe alive.
River Street Sweets and Savannah’s Candy Kitchen reveal how Southern confectionery became intertwined with the experience of visiting historic Savannah.
Unforgettable Bakery + Cafe connects baking with Haitian-American identity, entrepreneurship, and community service.
Auspicious Baking Company represents the city’s contemporary artisan pastry movement.
And Savannah Scone Company shows that local traditions are still being invented.
There is continuity between them, but not sameness.
The oldest began when cookies were delivered through Savannah in a Model T. The newest experiments with hundreds of scone flavors. One preserves a cookie associated with a long-gone Jewish bakery. Another cooks pralines in copper kettles in view of visitors. Another uses baking as a platform for community work.
Together they show that Savannah’s sweet identity has always been about more than sugar.
It is about recipes being handed down, adapted, preserved, reimagined—and eventually associated so closely with a place that tasting them becomes another way of understanding the city.
A Savannah Dessert Story Still Being Written
Savannah is especially good at making the past feel present.
That happens in its architecture and public squares, but it happens in its bakeries too.
A century-old cookie company still welcomes visitors. A Chocolate Chewie connects modern Savannah with a bakery that is gone. Family candy recipes continue to draw people toward River Street. New bakers are creating pastries and specialties that may become tomorrow’s traditions.
That is what makes Savannah such a natural Doughful city.
Its dessert culture is not frozen in history. It is established and evolving.
And the sweetest way to understand it may be to follow the dough from one story to the next.