Bill Knapp’s
Growing up in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, or Illinois had its perks. One of them was called Bill Knapp’s. The first Bill Knapp’s location opened in Battle Creek, Michigan, back in 1948 by Clinton B. Knapp, who was a former traveling salesman.
His main goal was to offer traveling business people inexpensive and delicious food items. Within a couple of decades, he managed to reach nearly 70 Bill Knapp’s locations, distinctive for their brick colonial structures and their green shutters and doors.
However, in the early 1990s, chopped steak platters, bowls of chicken noodle soup, and fried shrimp baskets were no longer attractive to most customers, so the popular chain filed for bankruptcy in 2002. Nowadays, Bill Knapp’s only exists as a commercial bakery based in Saline, Michigan.