The Honey Baked Ham Co.® offers a completely unique franchise opportunity. Part specialty-food retail, part delicious lunchtime destination, part catering and part corporate and individual gifting, our business operates year-round with peaks around the holidays.
Today, it’s hard to imagine a special meal without a sweet, smoked Honey Baked Ham but, if it weren’t for the enterprising ingenuity of our founder, Harry Hoenselaar, we wouldn’t be America’s Favorite Ham. His story is our story.
Harry Hoenselaar invented the spiral-slicer and belief in his machine changed the way we all enjoy the world’s best ham and other delicious family meal favorites.
Back in the 1940s Mr. Hoenselaar worked in a butcher shop in Detroit and invented things around the house for his wife and kids. During his work at the butcher shop he noticed that the customers struggled to carve bone-in hams. As a result of all this, Mr. Hoenselaar invented the first hand-operated spiral slicing machine, which he patented in 1949.
In 1957, Mr. Hoenselaar opened the first Honey Baked Ham Co.® store in Detroit, Michigan, where he sold the only ham that was pre-sliced in a patented spiral design. Harry chose to smoke the highest-quality bone-in hams for hours over a special blend of hardwood chips and added a secret recipe sweet glaze to make his top-quality hams more tender and flavorful than anything else available on the market then, or today.
We take this innovative spirit to heart at The Honey Baked Ham Co.®, and are constantly looking for ways to improve our products and systems to help our franchisees grow their businesses and ensure that customers continue to love our products.
The Honey Baked Ham Co.® has over 400 locations across the United States where families buy their holiday hams, turkeys, roasts, BBQ, deli options, side dishes and family-favorite desserts, as well as enjoy both dine-in and catered lunch offerings. Our franchisees also provide gifting options from gift cards to hams and a variety of other HoneyBaked specialty products.
