Debbi Fields Net Worth

Debbi Fields (née Debra Jane Sivyer; born September 18, 1956) is the founder and spokesperson of Mrs. Fields Bakeries. She has written several cookbooks and makes cookies. A resident of Memphis, Tennessee for over 16 years since she remarried in 1997, she moved to Nashville in 2014. Her late husband, Michael Rose, was the former CEO/Chairman of Holiday Corp. and Harrah’s Entertainment, Inc. He died of cancer on April 2, 2017, at the age of 75.

Mrs. Fields Cookies operates in over 250 locations.

What is Debbi Fields’ Net Worth?

Debbi Fields is an American entrepreneur and author who has a net worth of $200 million. Debbi Fields is best known as the founder of snack food franchiser Mrs. Fields. Since the company’s launch in Palo Alto, California in 1977, it has expanded to more than 750 locations in over 20 countries around the world. Among her other endeavors, Fields has penned a number of cookbooks.

She was one of the first Oakland A’s ball girls during the ’60s and used her five-dollars-an-hour earnings to start her cookie business when she was 13 years old. When Fields was 19, she wed her first husband, Randy Fields. She launched her cookie company in Palo, Alto, California, in 1977, when she was a 20-year-old housewife.

Fields’ cookie baking business franchised in 1990 and was later sold during the early ’90s. Fields remains the business’ spokeswoman. She is the author of a handful of cookbooks, including the first to ever top the “New York Times” bestseller list. She is famous for her motto, “Good Enough Never Is”.

Family

Debra Jane Sivyer was born in Oakland, California. Her father was a welder for the Navy and her mother was a housewife. She is the youngest of five daughters.

In the 1970s, the Oakland Athletics introduced “ball girls” (young girls who would sit in foul territory near the baselines to retrieve baseballs grounded foul by batters) to the team. Sivyer, with the help of a sister who at the time was a secretary at the A’s offices, was one of the first ones hired. She was paid five dollars an hour and would use the money to buy ingredients for what would become her famous cookies. She instituted a “milk-and-cookies” break for the umpires.

In 1974, Sivyer graduated from Alameda High School, California at the age of 17. She was also voted homecoming queen her senior year. She attended Foothill College, a community college in Los Altos Hills, California, for two years.

In 1976, at the age of 19, Sivyer married 29-year-old Stanford graduate Randall Keith Fields (MA, Political Science, 1970), founder in the early 1970s of the financial and economic consulting firm Fields Investment Group, taking the name she would soon use for her business.

Fields began her business in 1977 in Palo Alto, California, and at its height franchised 650 retail bakeries in the United States and over 80 in 11 different countries.

Fields and Randall had five daughters named Jessica, Jenessa, Jennifer, Ashley, and McKenzie, but divorced in 1997. On November 29, 1997, she married Michael Rose. One of her five stepchildren from their marriage, Gabrielle Rose, swam for Brazil at the 1996 Summer Olympics.

Fields began franchising in 1990, and, though she sold the business to an investment group in the early 1990s, she remains the company’s spokesperson.

The History Channel included Mrs. Fields Cookies in their third season (S3E6) of The Food That Built America series.

Mrs. Fields

In August of 1977, Fields founded her own cookie company, Mrs. Fields, in Palo Alto, California. Offering homemade-style cookies, the company soon became enormously popular, opening stores in numerous shopping malls and airports in the United States. In 1982, the company headquarters was moved to Park City, Utah. Later, in 1990, Mrs. Fields was sold to an investment firm. The company went on to acquire a number of other brands over the course of the decade, such as TCBY, Pretzel Time, Pretzelmaker, and Great American Cookies. One of the biggest retailers of freshly baked cookies and brownies, Mrs. Fields has more than 300 franchised locations across the United States and over 100 in countries around the world. In addition to its on-premise baked goods, the company offers retail groceries and gifts.

In 2007, Nexcen Brands bought Pretzelmaker and Pretzel Time from Mrs. Fields; it later purchased Great American Cookies in 2008. Due to these sales and consequent company restructuring, Mrs. Fields had many layoffs, and was in danger of bankruptcy. In 2011, the company faced the threat of bankruptcy again, but avoided it by handing over control to its creditors, Carlyle and Z Capital Partners. Mrs. Fields moved its corporate headquarters to Broomfield, Colorado in 2012; the next year, Z Capital Partners became the company’s sole owner. However, Fields herself remains the company spokesperson. In 2014, the company acquired Maxfield Candy and Nutty Guys.

Real Estate

In the 1980s, Debbi and her first husband owned a 200,000 acre ranch in Utah which became a bone of contention during their divorce trial. The couple fought bitterly over who should actually own the ranch and ultimately lost it to foreclosure after years of neglect and unpaid taxes. The ranch, which sat vacant for a decade while the battle was raging, was bought at auction for $3.5 million in 2011. After years of renovations, the new owner put the ranch on the market for $45 million in September 2019.