Annie's macaroni and cheese, devoured daily by millions of children of all ages, has grown from a local enterprise with a rabbit logo and the owner's home number on the box to a $600 million company whose shares began trading this year under the stock symbol BNNY, and have zoomed ahead on Wall Street.

Behind the stock symbol there is a real Annie, a laid-back woman with a radiant smile and a peaceful manner. The creator of the original Annie's Shells & Cheddar, Annie Withey no longer has her number on those purple, yellow and red boxes.

She still works for the Berkeley, Calif., company — with the official title of "inspirational president" — but she lives 3,000 miles away in an 1840s house on a farm in Hampton, with her husband, Rob Miller, and their two daughters, Molly and Phoebe.

Withey doesn't manage anyone at Annie's, she's not on the board and she doesn't have to check in at the office. And despite the wealth she has amassed from the initial public offering in March — and from the sale of her prior enterprise, Smartfood — she has no plans to upgrade her lifestyle.

"I have lived a modest, simple life and still do. I guess it's who I am," said Withey, 49, a Canton native with long, prematurely gray hair.

Farming their 8 acres keeps the couple busy during the spring and summer; a few days away in Maine in early August is the extent of their vacation plans. "We live pretty simply," she said, which includes being outside weeding until 6 every evening.

Bigger cars or huge-screen television? "I don't think so," she said.

Withey, the daughter of two schoolteachers, said she was shy as a child, not popular, and a dud at sports. She majored in English at the University of Connecticut. Although her name has become synonymous with healthy, organic, all-natural food, she never wanted to be a businesswoman or an executive at the multimillion-dollar company that Annie's is today.

"It wasn't my strength to manage people," she said, "so I chose to do the consumer, marketing thing. It was a deliberate choice."

Twenty-three years after Withey and her first husband founded the company in Boston, Annie's Inc. now has 125 products with sales of $141 million in the fiscal year that ended in March — an increase of 20 percent from the previous year.

That's a lot more food than the company was selling in 1993, when Withey told The Courant's Colin McEnroe that she was personally answering letters from customers and writing notes with shipments. She worried at the time that the success of Annie's would erode the small-enterprise culture she cherished.

"It's so important to me to keep it that way," she said in that 1993 article. "I don't want to lose touch with my loyal fans."

"I always envisioned Annie's just being a New England company," she said this month. Its current success "just blows my mind."

But she said she's confident that the direction she set for the company — sustainable agriculture, organic ingredients, no artificial ingredients, support for farmers and communities — continues.

"I believe that the mission is totally still intact," she said.

That mission is part of Annie's official filings with federal securities regulators: "to cultivate a healthier, happier world by spreading goodness through nourishing foods, honest words and conduct that is considerate and forever kind to the planet."

Smartfood To Annie's

Withey first developed Smartfood — the best-selling popcorn, flavored with white cheddar cheese and sold in a distinctive black bag — in 1984 in her Boston kitchen. She was seeking a product to show off a new kind of reclosable bag that her then-husband, Andrew Martin, and a partner had invented.

"People were starting to think about health and eating healthier," she said.

Sales took off — but the bag didn't.

"The whole point was to get the reclosable bag on the market, but that never happened. People were eating so fast," she said.

In 1989, snack food giant Frito-Lay bought Smartfood for about $15 million. She used a third of the $1 million she received in the sale to buy the 14-acre farm near the property she had moved to, in Hampton. The rest went into her next venture.

Smartfood had given Withey the idea of using the same cheese instead of the artificial- looking orange cheese usually found in packaged macaroni and cheese products. In 1989, she bought a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese, but made it using natural powdered white cheddar. Annie's Homegrown took off.

The first product, Annie's Shells & Cheddar, had tiny pasta shells and white cheddar cheese powder that consumers mixed with milk and butter to form a cheese sauce. There were no preservatives or dyes. At the time, Withey said she knew instinctively that an all-natural product would sell.

"Smartfood made Annie's easy, because we had that success. People were familiar with Smartfood, and Stop & Shop was very eager to take on macaroni and cheese," she said. They later added Alfredo and Whole Wheat Shells & Cheddar.

Annie's, originally packaged in purple, was manufactured in Louisiana and stored in a warehouse down the road from their house. Martin used a neighbor's truck for deliveries.

There was no advertising budget, so Withey wrote chatty consumer messages for the back of the box about her pet rabbit Bernie, who became the company's mascot, and encouraged consumers to write and send pictures. Each box included her address and home phone number, and she answered every letter, enclosing a coupon for a box of pasta.

She went to ski resorts and handed out small cups of hot macaroni to hungry skiers, left boxes on chartered ski buses, and tossed out boxes during local parades or road races.

"If we could get it into people's hands, we were pretty confident they would rebuy," she recalled, though it was often hard to muster up $30,000 in cash when a tractor-trailer arrived full of the boxes and had to be paid on the spot.

The popularity of Annie's rose along with increased interest in eating wholesome, organic food.

In 1999, John Foraker, who had been in the specialty food business in California, put together a group that invested $2 million to buy a controlling stake in Annie's. He became CEO and Withey assumed the title of "inspirational president," still writing the box notes.

Solera Capital LLC, a prominent private equity investment firm in New York, invested in 2002, and still owns over 50 percent of the stock. Martin left the company that year.

'Source of Pride'