This season, Knaus Berry Farm will limit how many cinnamon rolls you can buy

Food admin October 2, 2026 0 Comments

This season, Knaus Berry Farm will limit how many cinnamon rolls you can buy

When Knaus Berry Farm opens for its 70th season this October, customers are going to see a few changes — and the biggest involves just how many sweet, hot, gooey cinnamon rolls you’re allowed to buy at a time.

Change is something the iconic Miami farm stand and bakery, first opened by brothers Ray and Russell Knaus in 1956, weathered on a far larger scale last year. After decades at its original location, the Knaus family sold the South Miami-Dade business to a new ownership group, which moved it to a new spot along Krome Avenue.

Now, after a year of evaluation and alterations to its location, U pick fields, methods of payment and schedule, the Knaus team has instituted a few new rules. The most notable change is that purchases at the main cashier will be limited to four dozen cinnamon rolls per guest.

The plan is an attempt to speed up the long lines that stretched for hours last season, especially during the opening week, which also happened to be Christmas week.

General manager Joel White called last season a “tremendous” time of learning. The most important discovery was that he needed a better way to keep the lines moving. If, say, the first 10 customers of the morning are all ordering 12 dozen cinnamon rolls, which happens more than you might think, the small kitchen falls behind from the start. That means the line comes to a standstill, and wait times become excessive. On one particularly busy day, Joel spotted an entrepreneur or two across the street selling rolls they’d just purchased.

“I want a better customer experience, and I want customers to get in and out quickly,” White says. “Knaus Berry Farm is a tradition, but it’s a tradition of a lot of people just going once a year. I’d love for people to know that they can get in and out quickly, and then have them come twice a year or three times a year.”

“We’re just not set up to have person after person get 12 dozen,” he adds. “My ultimate goal is to get folks in and out in less than an hour.”

Limiting the number of rolls isn’t a perfect solution — you could conceivably bring a friend or two with you and each buy four dozen. But White also says 95 percent of Knaus’ customers settle for four dozen rolls or less, so the new rules will only affect a relatively small number of buyers.

To further speed the process, Knaus is adding a fourth register and introducing an online ordering system that should be up and running in November. If you want to order between five and 12 dozen rolls, they won’t be hot from the oven, but you can get them via curbside pickup at a new separate entrance behind the farm. Pickup days for advanced ordering are released one month in advance, with a specific number of time slots available between 7:30 and 10:30 a.m.

Also happening this season is the return of U-Pick strawberries, a Knaus staple that had to be canceled last season due to the move. Working with Accursio Farms, the Knaus team will plant 25,000 strawberry plants in the field next to the property. If weather conditions cooperate, always a question in South Florida, strawberries could be ready by Christmas. If not, look for them in January once conditions cool.

The farm has also increased the parking and extended the season to 30 weeks in hopes of giving fans a longer period to enjoy not only the cinnamon rolls but also shakes, jellies and baked goods. This year, the menu will add mango shakes and slushies, made with fruit picked over the summer, as well as guava and hot pepper guava jellies.

What won’t change are two major innovations from last year: the introduction of credit card purchases and the farm being open on Sundays.

White calls the credit card addition instead of the longstanding cash-only rule “a grand slam.”

“We don’t know what the previous average order of the check was,” he says, adding that 81 percent of the orders were paid for with a credit card. “But last year people weren’t limited by the cash they had on hand, so they could add on produce or add on another pie to their orders.”

Another thing that hasn’t changed: the Knaus kitchen team, which still includes Thomas Blocher, who oversaw the bakery program for 40 years, as a kitchen consultant to keep the cinnamon rolls up to the standards Miami expects.

“It‘s the same menu, the same ovens, the same recipes,” White says. “Thomas says that every year people would say ‘You’ve changed the recipe. It’s changed, right?’ But the reality is we have the same vendors for ingredients, the same machinery, same staff, and same products. And Thomas is still working with us.“

You know what else is the same? That little happy dance customers do after biting into a Knaus cinnamon roll, that warm burst of sugar filling their senses, memories and nostalgia flooding back to a simpler time (trust us that there were simpler times in Miami). A Knaus cinnamon roll isn’t merely a sweet treat; it’s a time machine into Miami’s past, a rite of passage passed from generation to generation.

Seeing that thrilled reaction is one of the highlights for White.

“Seventy years in business is tremendous,” he says. “We really have an awesome team, with 140 years of experience in the kitchen. It’s very exciting to be opening again.”