Claxton, Ga., which sits not far from Savannah, is a town that’s bound to help you work up an appetite for this delicious, if not necessarily revered, confection.

“The whole town smells like fruit cake,” said John Womble, the third generation Womble to carry on the Georgia Fruit Cake Company tradition. “If you come here, you’re going to want to eat a piece of fruit cake. You can’t help yourself.”

Which is OK, because there is plenty of fruitcake to be found in the city.
Georgia Fruit Cake Company, one of two bakeries in Claxton producing the tradidtional holiday dessert, was founded in 1917 by Ira Womble Sr. Ever since that day successive generations of Wombles have been working in the bakery.

“We still put the youngsters to work here when they get old enough,” said Ira Womble Jr., the reigning patriarch of this fruit cake dynasty. “We start them boxing up the canned fruit cakes we make. They earn some spending money and they learn the value of a dollar. They find out that those fruit cakes that provide their houses and clothes don’t just appear. They learn that somebody’s got to work to bake them.”

It’s the same lesson Ira Jr. learned as he grew up working in the family business. His work at the bakery was interrupted by a hitch in the service, part of which he served in Okinawa.

“When I got home from Okinawa after the service, I thought I’d never have anything to do with Okinawa again.” Womble Jr. remembered. “The first day back on the job, the first thing I had to do was get all these fruitcakes ready for shipment to Okinawa.”

Womble’s first assignment wasn’t all that much of a coincidence. After all, Georgia Fruit Cake Company Supplies fruit cakes to all the United States Military posts throughout the world. And it takes a lot of fruit cakes to fill that order along with all the others that the company has. The larges single order the company has ever filled is 65,000 cakes. The smallest—one cake of course.
“The most we’ve ever produced in a day is about 8,000 pounds of batter,” Womble, Jr. said. “That makes thousands of fruitcakes.”

The batter, he explained, is mixed in batches of 1,100 pounds at a time. The mixers that it takes to churn the rich, fruit-filled concoction have 20-horsepower motors.
Just what goes into that mix is a family secret. Only Ira Womble Sr., Ira Womble Jr., and John Womble have ever mixed up the batter.
Whatever the combination of fruit, flour, sugar, and eggs, it must be pretty close to the perfect formula. In 1976, the Georgia Fruit Cake Company won the Monde Selection Gold Medal for Excellence in Taste, Quality, and Purity during the 15th Canned Food Products World Selection in London, England.