Olde Colony began as Colony Bake Shop at 101 Broad Street in downtown Charleston, where Peter and Leila Kikos were baking in the 1940s; Peter had run the dining programs at Harvard and the University of Pittsburgh before that. Wedding cakes were the mainstay. The benne wafers they started selling to tourists in 1953 are what the city remembers.
Benne is the Bantu word for sesame, brought to the Lowcountry by enslaved Africans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and eating the wafers is said to bring good luck. The recipe is more than a hundred years old and is said to be the only original benne wafer recipe still in existence. In 1990 Peter Rix came down from Pittsburgh looking for a business, tasted one, and he and Sheila ran the bakery for the next thirty-one years: first on King Street, then from 519 Wando Lane in Mount Pleasant, which they bought in 2012.
When the Rixes retired in 2022, Ben Gramling and Mikell Harper, who also own Water’s Edge on Shem Creek, bought the bakery and said they would stay the course. The Original Charleston Benne Wafers, Benne Cheese Zingers, Pecan Pinchies, and Carolina Key Lime Cookies are still made and packed by hand, the old-fashioned way, in what the bakery calls the oldest family-operated bakery in the historic Charleston area.
