CHARLESTON — Guests form a line inside Callie’s Hot Little Biscuit on Upper King Street. They queue up shoulder-to-shoulder between a standing bar and shelves of cookbooks, trucker hats, biscuit crackers and blueberry lemon thyme preserves.
They peruse the menu, which touts breakfast sandwiches with bacon, eggs, cheese and sausage gravy. Biscuit flavors run the gamut, from the country ham creation that started it all to the cinnamon variety one man orders when he reaches the front of the line.
Seven miles away in North Charleston, a sweet scent fills a 100-plus-year-old former home on a recent Wednesday.
Inside the humble facility where all Callie’s Hot Little Biscuits are produced, butter, cream cheese, buttermilk and unbleached self-rising flour are combined with two types of sugar and cinnamon to produce the fluffy, mildly sweet rounds, which are earmarked for that King Street eatery or an online consumer who hails from farther away.
Callie’s Hot Little Biscuit has been handmade since 2005, and features small-sized biscuits that owner Carrie Morey favors as they’re easy to eat and bake evenly.
Henry Taylor/Staff
@htaylor@postandcourier.com
The biscuits rolled and shuffled onto a baking sheet before heading into the oven, just like Callie White did many years ago at her home in Charleston.
White, who would sell the biscuits at catering gigs, came up with this particular recipe as a nod to cinnamon toast. Back then, she never imagined this and other flavors would become the darling of the South like they have over the last two decades. It has because of the efforts of her daughter, Carrie Morey, who launched the company with the goal of rekindling a passion for homemade biscuits.
It would be easy to assume that a brand with such far reach would take shortcuts, but not Callie’s Hot Little Biscuit. This small-batch approach to running a large-scale company has been key to its success.
Continuing to grow while upholding its promise to deliver fresh, authentically Southern biscuits should propel the business into the future.
Sarah Mansfield uses a biscuit cutter to pop out biscuits from her spread of dough inside the bakery at Callie’s Hot Little Biscuit production facility, Wednesday, March 26, 2025, in North Charleston.
Henry Taylor/Staff
How it started
White can’t recall exactly how she came up with the biscuit recipe. She always made hers with two fats — butter and cream cheese — which produced a perfectly flaky biscuit that her catering clients grew to adore. They were baked in small portions to avoid a dry center.
White was pulling back from catering when her daughter, Morey, approached her with an idea. What if we froze the biscuits and sold them online?
“I said, ‘You’ve really kind of lost it,’ ” White recalled.
The business model was much crazier in 2005 than it is today. Social media platforms weren’t available for free advertising, and demand for mail-order goods — especially food products — was low.
Biscuits would be particularly challenging, White thought, because everyone in the South was already making them at home. Morey saw it differently.
“It just wasn’t something that people made anymore,” Morey said. “That made me even more interested in wanting to kind of revive this art.”
The mother-daughter duo knew from White’s catering events that her ham biscuit could maintain its freshness after being frozen. When the business launched, it became Callie’s first hot little biscuit. Morey laments her decision to start with this instead of the more classic buttermilk variety.
Carrie Morey, founder and owner of Callie’s Hot Little Biscuit, poses for a portrait inside the bakery’s storage area for packaging boxes, which quickly grew to line the walls of the building’s porch, Wednesday, March 26, 2025, in North Charleston.
Henry Taylor/Staff
Still, it didn’t take long for Callie’s to take off. At a small facility near Meeting and Line streets, biscuits were baked, flash-frozen and shipped to customers, just like they are today near the Navy Yard in North Charleston. Business was slow at first, but in 2008, Callie’s was catapulted by a full spread in Saveur Magazine, recipe in The Washington Post and a feature on Oprah’s “O List.”
As momentum built, Morey saw an opportunity to scale the business. Her mother was ready to move on.
White adored cooking but had no interest in helping run a production kitchen. She gave up her share in the business in 2010, four years before Callie’s first brick-and-mortar location opened on King Street.
“Once I moved out, I stayed out,” said White, whose son is an owner of Graft and Tutti Pizza.
Meanwhile, Morey learned to juggle small-business ownership with her full-time job as a mother of three daughters, each of whom would go on to work for Callie’s during their young adult years.
There were moments of doubt, as she figured out how to put out fires on the go.
“It’s not easy,” she said. “You have to be a problem-solver when you’re a business owner, and so you just look at things differently.”
Dae’quan Perry slots a tray of biscuits into the oven, Wednesday, March 26, 2025, in North Charleston.
Henry Taylor/Staff
Morey continued to adapt as the business grew. Callie’s King Street storefront was an instant hit, drawing lines of customers down the sidewalk and helping establish the brand into a nationally-known entity.
Retail locations in Atlanta and Charlotte, two cookbooks, and grocery store deals with Publix and Harris Teeter followed.
“It’s just kind of slowly evolved authentically and organically as our children have grown,” Morey said.
What’s next?
These days, Callie’s Hot Little Biscuits are sold online, in grocery stores and at two downtown Charleston counter-serve restaurant locations: the King Street original and a smaller outpost in the Charleston City Market. Weekly catering gigs bring biscuit sandwiches to corporate events and other gatherings every week, a nod to the business’s roots.
Callie’s website features seven types of biscuits, with specialty flavors released in limited quantities each month in 2025 to celebrate its 20th anniversary. E-commerce consumers can also purchase pimento cheese, cheese wafers and biscuit crackers, an idea that spawned as a way to keep leftover dough from going to waste.
The desk of Carrie Morey, founder of Callie’s Hot Little Biscuit, with an array of signage, packaging and logistics lining the wall behind her chair, Wednesday, March 26, 2025, in North Charleston.
Henry Taylor/Staff
It might sound like Morey’s biscuit house is thriving, and in many ways it is. But there are still challenges, from the closure of the Atlanta and Charlotte stores to sticker shock of getting good placement in grocery stores to the devastating impacts Amazon and its free shipping has had on small businesses like hers.
Morey has hired a marketing agency to help with her five-year plan to grow Callie’s e-commerce arm.
But the day we visit the factory, future success couldn’t be farther from her mind. She was more concerned with baking enough biscuits to fill 1,500 boxes, which would then be loaded and sent off to QVC in a matter of eight hours.
Addressing each challenge as it arises has worked for Morey so far.
Why stop now?