Finishing touches: Stockwood's up for sale after decades in the family

A lot of cakes, snacks and meals have been sent out the Stockwood's front door in the store's five-decade history.

Now, the owners of the storied St. John's business have a new offer for customers: The store itself.

The for-sale signs are up on Freshwater Road.

General Manager Cathy Ivimey and owner Marilyn Stockwood, daughter of the store's founder, hope the business will live on with the Stockwood's name, and maybe even those old recipes.

It will certainly need some new blood.- Cathy Ivimey

"It'll need a little bit of a facelift, but we would love it to continue as Stockwood's," Ivimey told the St. John's Morning Show. 

"We're getting older now, so it's time for us to pass it on, hopefully to somebody else."

Long history, lots of change

Stockwood's was opened in the 1950s, Ivimey said, started by Marilyn Stockwood's father in his own house. He would deliver his food around town, "working, baking all day," Ivimey says.

It then became a snack bar on the corner of Freshwater Road and Oxen Pond Road. It had stints where it would be primarily a deli, a wholesale shop, and a snack store.

"We still do our cakes and our sweet icings the way that they were done 40, 50 years ago," Ivimey says.

For a long time, Ivimey said, Stockwood's was the "only game in town" — before retail giants like Walmart came to town.

At that point, they were the major supplier for the town's wedding cakes, a major destination for bakers.

The store was also one of the first to stay open 24-hours.

"We would be a place for the plow drivers, the police, the fire department, taxi drivers, people who have taken loved ones to the hospital," Ivimey said.

If these walls could talk...

Ivimey began working with store in 1971. First as a cashier, she's now the general manager.

After all those years, she has lots of memories: Like an intricate, nine-layer, tear-drop inspired cake that she once made, or the children who used to come to the back door of the shop for five-cent bags of "cuttings," or scraps.

One time, a woman shopping for wedding things lost her child inside the store.

"We were just ready to panic, and anyways we found her asleep on top of the bread rack. While she was waiting for her mom she crawled in and had a nap," Ivimey said. "Right on top of our bread!"

Now that Marilyn Stockwood is ready to retire, and with no one in the family to pass the business on to, Stockwood's is up for sale, Ivimey said.

"We would hope to sell it as it is. It will certainly need some new blood, a little bit of refreshing, probably [get] back in to some of the things that we used to."