Get ready to “fall” deeper in love with pumpkin muffins! Go behind the scenes to see how ours are made with a bit of autumn magic in our bakery plant in Lakeland, Florida.

Step 1

The journey begins with pumpkin puree. The puree is cooked in the kettle room and then cooled down.

Step 2

Dry, premixed ingredients and the cooled pumpkin puree are brought to the mixing station, where they’re blended with water, spices and oil. After about 5 minutes, the batter is smooth and ready for baking.

Step 3

Lined muffin pans are then filled with batter and baked in an industrial 90-foot tunnel oven for about 35 minutes. As the muffins travel through the oven, they pass through 3 temperature zones ranging from 300 to 350 F. Once baked, they’re transferred to another conveyor belt and go through the cooling spiral.

Step 4

After they’re cooled, the muffins move to a packing line where they’re carefully hand-packed into containers. The packages of muffins are weighed for accuracy and checked for quality and food safety. A machine then adds the product label — created in-house at Publix’s printing services department — onto each container.

Step 5

A robotic palletizing process packages 8 containers of muffins into a box, then labels them and puts them on pallets. From there, the boxes are loaded onto trucks and shipped to our distribution centers, where the muffins are sent to our stores.

About the bakery plant

Opened in 1972, the Lakeland bakery plant originally had 27 associates and 27,000 square feet of space. More than 50 years later, the original bakery still stands and has expanded to include more than 500 associates, 13 production lines and 225,000 square feet. That’s the size of almost 4 football fields!

Other popular Publix products made at the Lakeland bakery plant include our Italian five grain sub roll, carrot bar cake and buttercream icing.