This is what makes a perfect muffin: A 2:1 ratio of muffin top-to-base, maximizing the surface area in which the batter develops a browned crust that’s slightly singed around the edges. As Elaine Benes famously said in The Muffin Tops episode of Seinfeld: “It’s the best part. It’s crunchy, it’s explosive, it’s where the muffin breaks free of the pan and sort of does its own thing.”

This was the bar set by Toronto-based muffin chain Mmmuffins (full name: Marvellous Mmmuffins). In the chain’s ’80s and early ’90s heydays, almost every Canadian mall had a location that offered a rotating menu of flavours. Everyone had their favourite: some liked the cornmeal muffin, others peach bran, while my mom loved the seldom-seen pineapple muffin.

But then Mmmuffins started disappearing in the mid-90s and the last location I remember seeing was at Union Station in the early 2010s. While muffins can be found at nearly every cafe now, no other muffin quite matched the chocolate chip from Mmmuffins I remember having in the early ’90s.

Now in all of Canada, only two Mmmuffins still exist. According to the company’s site there’s one in Quebec, and the other is hidden in plain sight at the busy food court of Scotia Plaza just off the entrance to King Subway Station in the PATH.

Fuelled by nostalgia, I tried to find out what happened to the Mmmuffin chain.

“In its era, Marvellous Muffins provided a product that was really different at the time and it was memorable,” says Michael Bregman, who founded Mmmuffins in 1979 with his late father, Lou. “The size, shape, flavour, quality, it was very different from the other muffins at the time and it’s hard to find opportunities like that. It was a niche that was unexplored.”

Bregman doesn’t own the Mmmuffins brand anymore and is currently the CEO of an investment management company called Tailwind Capital, as well as chair of Second Cup Coffee Co. His office at Yonge St. and St. Clair Ave. W. is the same intersection where the Mmmuffin idea took shape, but to understand how Bregman got to muffins, he first tells me about bagels.

The Bregman family had a small food empire in Toronto, starting with a bakery called Bagel King. Bregman’s grandfather made bagels and his father, Lou, left school in Grade 6 to work in the family business. In 1957, Lou opened the first Bagel King on Eglinton Ave. W. and then in the ’60s, a second spot in Yorkdale Mall, where a 10-year-old Bregman worked the counter on weekends.

In 1977, after graduating from University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school and earning an MBA at Harvard, Bregman returned to Toronto to work as the assistant for a family friend, the late Dave Nichol, then-president of Loblaws, which carried Bagel King’s bagels.

“I loved the job but I made a deal with him not to put me near the bakery business. I spent my life in bakeries. I’d done it. It’s over,” says Bregman, who was 24 at the time.

Despite their agreement, Nichol had a task for him.

“One day Dave gives me this project to make the bakery business better. I told him we had a deal but he said to ‘just do it’.”

On a quest to find new products for Loblaws, Bregman and the bakery department head met a baker from Hamilton who made these giant muffins that were unheard of at the time.

“Muffins were usually one-and-a-half ounces, they didn’t have much of a top and they were more of a commodity. You had staples like blueberry, corn and bran. These muffins were four, four-and-a-half ounces, triple the size and were full of different grains, fruits, seeds, they were really interesting,” he says.

Still, Bregman was unsure whether these big muffins would take off. For one thing, they had to charge three times the price. He says back then, muffins cost about 15 cents, but they charged 45 cents (about $1.50 today). They did a test run in early 1979, introducing these premium muffins to two Loblaws locations: one in the affluent Bayview Village neighbourhood and another at Yonge St. and St. Clair Ave. W., where Bregman worked at Loblaws’ nearby corporate offices.

Without any signage or promotion, the muffins sold out by noon on the first day. The order was doubled the next day and those too sold out in the morning. By the end of the week, Loblaws ordered 16 times the original order of muffins and they all sold out. It was here that Bregman got the idea to create a stand-alone muffin shop.

The next six months of 1979 were a blur for Bregman. He agreed to stay at Loblaws while he worked on opening Mmmuffins as well as another new concept, a French-inspired bakery and cafe called Michel’s Baguette. His father sold his portion of the bagel company then signed on as a partner for the two new businesses. In October, Bregman’s parents also opened Bregman’s, a bakery and sit-down restaurant at Yonge and St. Clair that would go on to operate for nearly three decades (it’s now a Swiss Chalet).

“During the day, I was working at Loblaws. Then I’d go across the street to Bregman’s to close up at night because my parents were working there all day and needed to rest. Then I’d be back at Loblaws the next morning while creating Mmmuffins and Michel’s Baguette,” says Bregman. “I don’t know how I did it.”

Part of developing the Mmmuffins brand included coming up with brand new recipes. Bregman; his wife at the time, Barbara; and Lou tinkered with existing muffin recipes, trying to get the batter to rise and spill over the muffin tin to create a tasty and textured top. After months of testing they created five basic muffin mixes: chocolate fudge, carrot, bran, cornbread and the all-purpose “white” that would then be used as a base for flavours such as cheddar, raisin, peach and coconut.

In December 1979, Mmmuffins opened in the Eaton Centre. It was an immediate hit. He says people drove from far away to choose from a vast menu of muffins that were baked on premises and were never a day old.

Muffins were huge in the ’80s, says food trend expert Dana McCauley, whose consulting firm Blue Unicorn Innovation helps food startups get their product to the market. A 1988 LA Times article on the muffin trend said, “Industry observers attribute the popularity of muffins to the fact that they fit well into the fast-paced, health-conscious, yuppie lifestyle.” In the same article, a food industry analyst says, “There’s nothing more the consumer wants than convenience, taste and nutrition. It’s seldom a category has all three, but muffins have all three.”

One of the popular cookbooks of that decade was 1982’s Muffin Mania, self-published by Kitchener sisters Cathy Prange and Joan Pauli. It sold 500,000 copies worldwide.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“This was the time people did more snacking and the idea of taking food on-the-go became more acceptable. Back in the ’70s, your mom wouldn’t let you go out before you sat down at the table for lunch,” says McCauley, who remembers working across from a Mmmuffins as a teen in Richmond Hill’s Hillcrest Mall. Her favourite was the cheddar muffin.

She adds that what set Mmmuffins apart was that each of the locations would have its baking carts out for everyone to see (and smell), letting customers know the muffins were fresh. “From a marketing perspective, this was a smart move and ahead of the curve in creating a food experience.”

As for the perceived healthy factor, registered dietitian Cara Rosenbloom, who also remembers being a fan of Mmmuffin’s chocolate chip as a teen, says there are few reasons why people assumed muffins were a better breakfast option.

“When you look at a recipe for muffins, it’s basically cake with out the icing,” she says. “But even though cupcakes and muffins had the same basic shape, cupcakes had flavours like vanilla and chocolate whereas muffins had oatmeal and bran, which sound healthier on the spectrum of flavours, but they really weren’t much healthier than a cupcake. There was also less awareness of nutrition labels at the time.”

“Malls were being built across the country,” says Bregman. “In 1980, all these malls were offering leases and I had to make a decision. I had just franchised our first store on Eglinton but if I wanted to be in these malls, I had to go in now. Suddenly we’re opening across the country. In 1981 we opened nine stores in August alone.”

At its peak, Bregman estimates there were more than 130 Mmmuffins. Riding the success of the muffin business, in 1988 Bregman acquired fellow mall staple Second Cup Coffee Co. as he saw the espresso-based drink trend emerging from the west coast. In the early ’90s, Bregman sold off Mmmuffins and Michel’s Baguette to focus on coffee.

It was around this time that the muffin trend started to decline. The early ’90s was all about the low-fat craze as yogurt became the preferred portable breakfast. By the early 2000s, it was all about low-carb thanks to Atkins.

Muffins are, of course, neither low-fat nor low-carb.

“Food is a very creative sector and very rarely can you not have to reinvent yourself. I observed that Marvellous Muffins stopped innovating,” says Bregman on how Mmmuffins failed to adapt after he sold it. “I don’t know what they could have done, but they couldn’t stay still as other brands evolved. It sounds crazy now, but in the beginning we hit the health trend. But things change, and they had to keep up with what’s the next trend while keeping the core of what they offered.”

So while muffins faltered, its prettier cousin cupcake flourished. Dietitian Rosenbloom says that cupcakes enjoyed a boost in the ’90s thanks to Sex and the City popularizing the treat along with competition baking shows, such as Cupcake Wars, which first aired in 2009. “Cupcakes had more panache, elegance and excitement,” she says. “They have a decadent feel and you knew they were a dessert while people still saw muffins as breakfast.”

The Mmmuffins brand was passed around for the next couple of years, including being taken over by Timothy’s World Coffee and then a Vermont-based coffee company.

Most recently in February 2018, Quebec-based franchise operator MTY Group, which also owns food brands such as Country Style, Big Smoke Burger, Jugo Juice and Manchu Wok, bought what remained of Timothy’s and Mmmuffins, the latter having just three locations in all of Canada (it’s now down to two) for just $1.7 million.

Jason Brading, chief operating officer of the quick service restaurant division at MTY, says a resurgence in Mmmuffins stores is unlikely since places such as Tim Hortons already sell muffins. MTY is more interested in the high-traffic locations of where the two Mmmuffins are and will likely transform the remaining two stores into another food concept once the franchise leases expire in the next two years. However, Brading does say there is a chance Mmmuffins’s baked goods could live on at MTY’s cafes, such as Country Style.

Bregman, who says he still has the book of his original muffin recipes somewhere in his house, isn’t too heartbroken to see the demise of the Mmmuffins brand he created with his father all those years ago. But his eyes did light up when I presented him with two boxes of Mmmuffins at his office. He knew all the flavours just by looking at them and took a bite of the carrot nut muffin for a photo. “Oh, I think they changed the recipe,” he says. When I asked if it was for the better or worse, he diplomatically said it was different and continued to take another bite.

“What am I going to say, that it’s better than mine?”

Read more about: