Cyrus O’Leary’s serves up new slice of goodness

Cyrus O’Leary’s Pies will give the diet-conscious a break later this month.

The Spokane company will start stocking supermarket deli cases with six-ounce versions of its famous fruit and cream pies. Chocolate. Banana cream. Sour cream lemon. Even a marionberry cream never sold in the conventional nine-inch pan.

“We thought it was just a fun twist,” says Chief Executive Officer Barclay Klingel as he plunges a plastic fork into a hand-held purple and white morsel.

Fun and, hopefully, good for a bellyful of profits. Klingel expects the single-serving pies to eventually generate 10 percent of all revenues to Fresh Foods Corp. of America, the privately held parent of Cyrus O’Leary’s.The pie company, that is. The restaurant by the same name where the pies originated is under separate ownership. Fresh Foods is privately held by Klingel, restaurant founder Cyrus Vaughn and Dennis Dipo, the company’s operations manager.

Revenue figures are private as well, but there’s no hiding the $3 million, 40,000-square-foot headquarters and production facility that has housed Cyrus O’Leary’s since 2002.

In 1987, the pie business was moved out of the restaurant to 319 W. Second Ave. Despite repeated expansions at that address, the company finally relocated to the West Plains with the help of financing from the Washington Economic Development Finance Authority.

The results were immediate. Sales jumped 26 percent in 2003, and that increase was followed by a 19 percent bump last year.

The growth belies what Klingel says is a cautious approach to expansion.

To maintain quality, much of the old pie-making equipment and forms were moved from Second Avenue to Hayford Road. Crusts, fillings and toppings are all made from scratch. Some tasks that could be done using automation are still done by hand. Employment varies seasonally — sales peak during the Christmas holidays — from 60 to more than 120.

Dipo, a 25-year veteran of the pie business, oversees production.

The Hayford Road plant is not only more efficient, he says, it has allowed him to better control quality and consistency.

That can be tricky when you make a minimum of 26 varieties of pie each day, and as many as 60,000 in one six-day week. Competitors’ pies are mass-produced, then frozen.

Quality tells, as a handful of blue ribbons from the April meeting of the American Pie Council indicates.

About one-half the plant’s output is sold fresh within a 150-mile radius of Spokane. The rest are frozen — the plant has a 5,000-square-foot freezer — for shipment into California and the Salt Lake City area. Hawaii was recently added to the distribution area.

The single-serving pies open up a new frontier for Cyrus O’Leary’s, but industry press says competitors like Sara Lee have already tasted the fruits of downsizing. According to the June issue of “Snack Food and Wholesale Bakery,” consumers want dessert without guilt.

Klingel says the company has received hundreds of requests for a small pie from empty-nest couples who crave its pies but not so much that they want a thick wedge of Kahlua Cream tempting from the refrigerator. A full-sized pie weighs between 40 and 50 ounces, depending on the filling.

The challenge was delivering a product of comparable quality of a size that could be handled by machinery geared to the larger pie. And with the move and expansion into new territories, there just was not much idle time for development of something as a radical as a downsized banana cream.

“We’ve been working on this for seven years,” says Klingel, who credits company research and development specialist Tammi Rossi for perfecting the new pie.

Because the small size does not allow for a full crust, a wafer made of the same dough is set in the bottom of the plastic container that holds the filling and cream topping. A clear plastic top completes the shell, which is banded by a Cyrus O’Leary’s label that does not conceal the mouth-watering contents.

“This is perfect,” says Klingel. “We’ve never seen anything like this.”

He says URM will start distributing the pies in late August or early September.

Prices will range from $2.29 to $2.99, compared with $5.99 to $6.99 for regular-sized pies.

Klingel says the company will assess single-service pie sales in early 2006 to determine what varieties might be added to the lineup.

Banana cream pie without the guilt. What a concept.