Pie’s the limit for pastry experts

There can’t be many managing directors of a successful retail, hospitality and events business that reply personally to individual reviews, but for Jon Simon it’s an obsession.

The managing director and co-founder of Pieminister says: “I have an alert on my phone when anyone leaves a review and, if something is not right, then I will find out what happened as I am genuinely interested and care.”

Fortunately, there aren’t too many negatives, which Pieminister’s expanding restaurant business and strong sales (up 40% since the beginning of the year including new openings) are testament to. There have been two openings so far this year in Sheffield and Liverpool and a further two planned for 2018.

Simon says: “When we spoke of 30 sites by 2020, the casual-dining market was in a slightly different place to where it is now. But we have still got aggressive plans to keep growing. So, all being well, we will have a couple more open before the end of the year and keep pushing on.”

Generating cash

Target cities for openings include Brighton, Edinburgh and Glasgow and big university cities in the north-east. International expansion is also on the radar, although not for the immediate future.

The company secured a £1.65m financial package from HSBC late last year to fund further expansion and the bank also previously provided £1.4m of funding that saw the company open five new restaurants in 2016 and 2017.

Simon says: “We are generating cash across the hospitality and retail businesses and are at a point now where we are self-funding. So we are not looking to raise [money] at the moment. We are in pretty good shape.”

Pieminster now has 16 sites – nine casual-dining restaurants, five unlicensed café sites and two licensed cafés – and a trial franchise site in Bath. But Simon says: “We have no plans to open other franchises. As well as rolling out our own café and restaurant concept, we prefer to partner with the licensed trade, something we’ve become experts at during the past 15 years.”

Pie pubs

Pieminister’s successful partnership with licensed trade operators has seen it build to 16 fully branded Pieminister ‘pie pubs’, where the company provides branding support such as menu and A-boards and the pub offers a full Pieminister menu. There are also a further 25 ‘pubs with pies’ that have a lower level of branding and smaller menu offer and which Simon says are “growing quickly”. The company also works with 13 leisure and entertainment sites including London’s Brixton Academy (O2).

In addition the company has had a strategic partnership with Ei Group for two years, with Ei now operating 10 fully Pieminister branded managed pubs and three tenanted and leased pubs, with its most recent Pieminister site the Hope in London’s Fitzrovia.

Pieminister has also rolled out a new softserve ice cream offer across three further sites following a successful launch at its new Sheffield restaurant earlier this year. The ice cream sundae menu is now also available at Liverpool, Cardiff, and Brixton Market.

Desserts to boot too

The ice cream is produced with a Taylor soft serve machine from the US, which produces a higher density, more indulgent soft-serve ice cream that is served in a waffle cone ‘pie crust’.

Among the sundae options is the ‘Pork Pie-scream’ (vanilla ice cream laced with free range British bacon and Bourbon maple syrup, apple sauce and a free range British pork scratching), which Simon describes as a really “interesting flavour” like “crispy pancakes with bacon”.

Simon says: “The offer is helping build the dessert side of business which is doing really well, but you can also now just go in for an ice cream like an ice cream parlour. It helps combat seasonality. It is still a very lean offer but has a much broader appeal. The sundaes also looks great for the cool kids who are instagramming.”

Spooning ice cream has also been added at the menu at other restaurants to gauge demand.

A growing part of the Pieminister business is takeaway, which was introduced a year ago and now accounts for 10% of total food sales. About 30% of sales are from customers ordering from the restaurants and the remainder though delivery platforms Deliveroo and Uber Eats.

Simon says: “Takeaway has had a halo effect, helping to drive more people to try our restaurants out. You are battling with margins on takeaway, but with the way our sites are being laid out and their sizes and locations we are definitely not ignoring it.”

Brunch menu introduction

A weekend brunch menu was introduced to eight restaurant sites in April and two sites are also trialling bottomless brunch.

Simon says: “At the beginning of 2017, we launched a brunch pie and our brunch menu is a big launch to capitalise on this growing day part. The trial of bottomless brunch is doing really well and we are looking to do this monthly.”

Pieminister is also seeing a big demand for its vegan pie ‘Kevin’, which was introduced late last year after a year in development to perfect its vegan friendly pastry.

The pie is now ranked eighth out of its 15 pies in terms of sales and has overtaken sales of its vegetarian pies.

Another successful part of the Pieminister business is wedding catering, doing around 70 a year, and the company will also be catering at around 55 festivals across the UK this year.

Pride in responsibility

Pieminister is rightly proud of its corporate social responsibility credentials and new initiatives include working with charity Frank Water, which sells water bottled in recyclable glass bottles. The company stopped stocking plastic bottles and all profits go to its safe water programmes across the world. There are plans to install water-refilling stations outside restaurants.

Simon Kossoff, the former chief executive and chairman of Carluccio’s, joined the board of Pieminister last year and the managing director says he has been a great help in helping him and co-founder Tristan Hogg define the right strategy for the business.

With a thriving retail and wholesale business too, the Pieminister business has come a long way since its launch in 2003 in an old printworks in Bristol’s Stokes Croft where Simon, his wife and head of PR Romany, and co-founder Tristan Hogg launched a pie kitchen and shop, where the Simons’ baby son would sleep in the back office.

Simon says: “I’m very proud that we have grown from a pie shop in Stokes Croft and maintained the integrity of what we started in terms of product quality. We continue to enhance the quality and the ethical side of the business, which is extremely important to us… that can sometimes can get washed away as you grow.”

Jo Bruce is a freelance writer specialising in the food and drink sectors