Ferguson Plarre Turns 125: Why This Victorian Bakery Still Feels Like Home

There are certain smells that stop you in your tracks. Fresh vanilla slice. A sausage roll straight out of the oven. That distinctive sweetness of a Ferguson Plarre cake box being opened at a birthday party. This year, Victoria’s beloved family bakery is celebrating a genuinely remarkable milestone: 125 years in business.
For a company to survive that long, let alone stay family-run, is something worth raising a cream bun to.

Ferguson Plarre’s story stretches back to 1901, when Otto Plarre, a German immigrant with patisserie training, opened the original Plarre’s Cakes shop on Puckle Street in Moonee Ponds. That store is still trading today, making it the bakery’s oldest and longest-running location. The Ferguson side of the business has its own parallel history, and the two families eventually joined forces, with third-generation baker Ralph Plarre OAM bringing everything together under the Ferguson Plarre name we know now.
Five generations later, brothers Steve and Mike Plarre are steering the ship, with Steve as CEO and Mike heading up production. Speaking about the milestone, Steve said the business has spent 125 years perfecting recipes passed down through the family, from vanilla slices and chocolate eclairs to the perfectly flaky sausage roll and the beloved tiddly oggie. With almost 80 bakeries across Victoria, Ferguson Plarre has managed something increasingly rare: staying a comforting, reliable neighbourhood staple in a world chasing viral food trends.

The birthday celebrations have been running all winter, and they are properly generous. Ten thousand free slices of cake were handed out in early June with any purchase, and Sweet Rewards members have been treated to a rotating weekly special, with classic favourites priced at just $1.25, a cheeky one cent for every year the bakery has been baking. From 17 August to 6 September, the Retro Collection is bringing back five customer-voted favourites from the archives, including the Boston bun, Jaffa cake, peppermint cake, caramel slice and mushroom tart. Non-members haven’t missed out either, with discounts of up to 30 per cent on selected favourites throughout the season.

I’ll admit this milestone hits differently in our house. We have been buying our birthday cakes, pies and other treats from Ferguson Plarre for the last 25 years. A fifth of the bakery’s entire history has overlapped with our family’s celebrations, our sons’ childhood birthday parties, my all time favourite Black Forrest cake for the majority of my birthdays (as per my birthday last year, above), our quiet Sunday lunch runs and our “I can’t be bothered cooking tonight” family pie dinners. There is something lovely about a business that has quietly stitched itself into so many Victorian family stories, not through flashy marketing, but by simply making good food, consistently, for well over a century.
Happy 125th birthday, Ferguson Plarre. Here’s to the next 125 years of vanilla slices, sausage rolls and birthday cakes that taste exactly like they should!