Neighbors fondly referred to Marie Callendar as “the pie lady”—raving about her cherry pies bursting with bright red fruit, her apple pies with their rich buttery crust, and her custard pies with velvety lemon and coconut fillings. “In the 1940s, Callendar was hired by a Long Beach snack shop to make pies, which she made from home,” said TastingTable. “The snack shop owner encouraged her to grow that operation, and she began making enough pies [about 100 per day] to sell to other local eateries.”
Although it is Marie Callendar’s name that has been world famous for over 70 years, the Callendars were in truth a pie making family—Marie, her husband Cal who helped with the baking, and her son Don who delivered the pies on his bicycle. “Considering what an empire Marie Callendar’s became… the business started with very humble beginnings,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “The family did everything themselves; when they decided to take that full-time leap with the business in 1948, they had to sell their only car to invest in a tiny production space [a Quonset hut] and supplies.”
According to Mashed: “Don… encouraged his mother to open the family’s first restaurant in Orange, California, in 1964. That first little shop was an instant hit, in part because of Don’s idea of giving free slices of pie and cups of coffee to new customers.” In 1986—by which time Marie Callendar’s had grown to 120 locations in seven states—Don opted to sell the restaurant chain to Ramada for $80 million. This completed Marie Callendar’s transition from a family enterprise in the 1940s, to a business tribe in the 1970s, to an institutional entity.
None of us knows what will become of our mission—our baby—if we choose to release it into the wild. “The quality went down when [Don] sold the company in the 1980s and it went corporate,” the Times says. “Marie Callendar’s… has struggled for years. There have been bankruptcies, corporate mergers and splits.” Only 24 Marie Callendar’s restaurants are left now. In the early years every pie was a fresh handmade labor of love. Today, the giant ConAgra Corporation owns the licensing rights and manufactures more than 284 million Marie Callendar’s frozen desserts and meals annually.
