Tennessee’s food producers serve up the sweet, the savory and the saucy, a menu that provides not only dietary staples, but also economic stability to the state.

The Volunteer State boasts an array of well-known brands, from Bush’s Baked Beans to Jimmy Dean sausage to Pringles to Goo Goo Cluster and Little Debbie. Food manufacturing accounts for 36,000 jobs in the state.

“We don’t go up when the economy goes up and don’t go down when economy goes down,” says Steve Harrison, a vice president at Bush Brothers & Co. “We want people to eat at home and eat outside.”

The 101-year-old company has headquarters in Knoxville and its flagship plant in Chestnut Hill. In the last five years, Bush Brothers has spent more than $250 million upgrading its Jefferson County plant, a project now in its third phase. While the company has a classic product, it often introduces new varieties, including a line of “grilling beans” in 2008 that Harrison describes as “more robust” and mixed with other vegetables. “They are designed to complement steaks, chops, fish and chicken,” he says.

Jimmy Dean is another U.S. food mainstay, and parent company Sara Lee in October 2008 introduced a new line of breakfast entrees and added turkey sausage bowls and croissant sandwiches to its Jimmy D-Lites line. The Newbern plant in Dyer County employs about 800 people.

“The plant is one of the largest raw sausage manufacturers in the United States,” says plant manager Mark Porter.

Texas-based Five Star Custom Foods will invest $20 million over the next three years to locate a plant in Nashville that will initially employ between 70 and 100 people.

On the sweet side, Nashville-based Standard Candy Co. has been making the Goo Goo Cluster for nearly 100 years. The local labor market got a boost earlier this year when Standard closed its plant in Eastman, Ga., and transferred 250 jobs to Nashville.

Nutritional bars account for more than 90 percent of the company’s sales, though the Goo Goo Cluster is its signature product.

Like chocolate, Tennessee is hard to resist. Leclerc Foods, a Canadian company, started making granola bars at its new Kingsport facility in December 2008. A second production line, which is planned for 2009, will produce crackers.

The company projects a capital investment of up to $35 million and plans on hiring 100 people over the next three years.

Tennessee also is home to McKee Foods, with a plant in Collegedale that has been turning out treats for 70 years and today has sales of $1.5 billion. McKee, the nation’s largest snack cake producer by volume, makes Little Debbie, a product line named for the co-founder’s granddaughter that now tops 160 offerings.

The latest, introduced in April, is a 100-calorie cookies-and-cream concoction, making the company’s 10th product in the 100-calorie line. “Our customers say they taste better than the competitors’ and are about half the price,” says spokesman Mike Gloekler.

More than 3,000 people work at McKee and its subsidiaries in Tennessee, which include Sunbelt, Heartland and Fieldstone Bakery brands, Gloekler says. “We have fourth-generation family leader­ship and even some fourth-generation employees,” he says.