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Customers dig into new business
Glenda Burt is not exactly putting her feet up these days, but the pace of her life has definitely slowed down since the new year began. But, in recent years, the whole Burt family has been caught up in a meat pie production frenzy which begins in the early fall and does not end until Dec. 31. The statistics for this home-based operation are staggering. Last fall, the Burts produced 3,500 meat pies, bringing the year's tally to around 8,000. During one memorably hectic week, 1,243 pies came off the assembly line. That week Burt was never in bed before midnight and was up again the next day at 5:30 a.m. "I'm not pied out yet, but there are times when I feel that I've created a monster," she says. Asked when she made her debut in the culinary arts, Burt casts her mind back to childhood. "That would be when we made mud cakes in the puddles on our farm. I used to bake them on a little sandstone in the sun and come back to check on them as they cooked." While it may sound like an unsavoury meal choice to some, Burt insists that the activity, which never reached the level of taste testing, was a lot healthier than spending hours in front of a TV or computer monitor. By the time she reached her teens, she had graduated to peeling potatoes and scraping carrots in the kitchen of her mother, Mary Hickey. She was also lending a hand with bread-making and was helping to pick the blueberries that went into the fruit pies. When the Hickey family opened the Cabot's Reach restaurant in Malpeque, they would spend their summers in a nearby trailer and Burt would serve on tables. She also helped in meal production and began to think about a career as a dietician. But after spending a year studying at Acadia University, she decided that she wanted a more hands-on career, so she switched to Holland College to take courses in cooking. It was after graduation that Burt got into the serious business of pie making. She and her husband had just taken over Mary's Bake Shoppe, which had been started by her mother, who was still running the family's restaurant in Malpeque. The meat pies, like all the other homestyle baking, proved highly popular, says Burt. "Everything was prepared from scratch. There were no additives or preservatives in it. In the end, you have a better, more flavourful product, and that's what the public demands." Pie production came to an end when the Burts sold the business and started their B&B operation. But they soon discovered that the fall months in the hospitality business can be challenging. With the summer clients gone, there is a temptation to close up shop. And as Christmas got nearer, they wanted more pies. By the end of the year she had sold 300. "I thought that was so many," says Burt. Next year the phone calls and orders started earlier, and pie production leapt by another couple of hundred. By the time she hit the thousand mark, Burt was becoming a regular bulk buyer of meat at Kensington SaveEasy. In fact, the manager suggested she might like to produce pies for his shelves. Within the space of a year, her pies were on the shelves of Atlantic SuperStores in both Summerside and Charlottetown. Burt says she is overwhelmed by the popularity of her product. It still amazes her to see her meat pies on sale when she visits SaveEasy to do her weekly shopping. Her daughter gets quite excited about the whole thing. "Look, mum. That lady just put one of your pies in her basket," she exclaimed recently." "That really means a lot to her," says Burt, "especially when you realize she probably helped to bag and label that pie." The success of the pie business, which now operates on a year-round basis, has led to an expansion of the Old Home Place. A new foundation has been built and space has been created in the basement for full-scale production. The temptation is there to look at the possibility of marketing off-Island, but Burt is cautious about that prospect. "I would certainly give it consideration if a national company approached me, but I would not want our product to lose its homestyle appeal and neither would our loyal customers." The explosive growth of the business has been a surprise to everyone associated with it, including her children, father-in-law and extra staff who all assist in the production process. She says she never foresaw the developments that have occurred. "I didn't go out to the superstores. They called me. It all evolved in time. But we're a long way from making mud pies now." Glenda Burt says her current pie output is around 120 per week, but the total pre-Christmas production figures reached 3,500.
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