For Plush Pippin, Selling Millions of Pastries Is Easy as Pie : Food industry: Washington baker savors sweet success nationally with double-digit growth.

By CHERYL MURFIN

Sept. 28, 1995 12 AM PT

ASSOCIATED PRESS

KENT, Wash. — A tour through the Plush Pippin pie factory is like walking into Grandma’s kitchen on baking day--times 45,000.

That’s how many pies the company’s 160 workers produce each day--filling, forming and freezing more than 30 varieties, from old-fashioned apple to frothy lemon meringue to the multiberry “bumbleberry” pie. Millions of pastries are shipped annually to supermarkets across the country, where they are baked and sold at in-store bakeries or picked up from the freezer section for home baking.

The factory’s floor is dusted with fine pastry flour. Smells of fresh, ripe fruit, sugar and spice fill the air as ingredients are measured, combined and stirred into various fillings. And, like Grandma, workers are prone to smile and nod when they look up from their work.

“The vast majority of the comments we get are, ‘This tastes just like homemade,’ ” said Wynn Willard, Plush Pippin Corp. general manager. “In an age of microwaves and fast food, the art of home cooking is really a dying art. What we offer people is the kind of product that really reminds them of home. Our pies are packed with the best ingredients, but the real secret is our crust.”

Plush Pippin became a subsidiary of Nabisco Food Inc. in October, 1992, and moved its plant from Federal Way to Kent. Company founder Jerry Bullock said the pie manufacturing plant is the first Nabisco has ever purchased. But the new owner has not tampered with Plush Pippin’s tried-and-true baking approach.

“The key to success is consistency, and Nabisco has let us continue doing what we’ve done well over all these years,” said Bullock, who sold his company to Seattle investors in 1986. “But they have the finances to buy the very best ingredients and equipment available today. When I taste the pies now, and I do just about every day, they are just as good as when we were making them 30 years ago. We were just making fewer back then.”

Bullock and his brother Burt started Plush Pippin Restaurants Inc. in 1973 with four restaurants in the Portland area. The restaurants were known, of course, for their luscious pies. By the time the brothers sold the company, 22 Plush Pippin restaurants dotted the Northwest and Minnesota. The new owners sold the restaurants several years ago, opting instead to provide pies wholesale to major grocery stores and grocery suppliers.

“The wholesale business, we discovered, was easier and more lucrative,” Willard said.

It was a big change from the old days, Jerry Bullock said, and one that gave him at least a nudge of “nostalgic sadness.”

“This was a family operation that started out with one unit and basically we figured that was where it would go,” Jerry Bullock said. “We never expected what we started out with would turn into what it’s ended up being. But I’ve been with the [new] company from the start, and I’m really excited to see just how far it can go.”

Willard would not disclose the company’s profits, but he said business had grown “in double digits” in each of the past six years. And that business is sizable. Based on the company’s own estimates, retailers are selling at least $50 million worth of Plush Pippin pies a year.

The company boasts its fillings are 65% fruit. “It’s a great value,” Willard said.

The company introduces four or five new products each year, Willard said, and sent its new reduced-fat pies to market in March under Nabisco’s SnackWell’s product line. SnackWell’s list of low-fat treats is one of the fastest-growing and best-selling lines in the supermarket industry today, Willard said.

“It’s a real high-growth area,” he said. “Sometimes you want that dessert, and indulgence is the first priority. But then there are times and people who want the same enjoyment but with fewer calories.”

The factory is a constant flurry of motion. In one room, fruit processors thaw and stir the fruits while others mix the fillings. The workers move in sync, rolling huge vats of pie filling from place to place.

Next door, pie assemblers working at the old Rotary 9 assembly machine tap the dough as it rolls down the conveyor belt. They wait for the pressed sheets to appear, place thick dough over pie pans, add the fruit and top it all off with a crust hat. The machine is more labor-intensive than the larger, faster Series 90 Straight Line machines across the room, but it is useful in producing smaller runs of pies.

The Rotary 9 produces 6,000 pies in an eight-hour shift, compared with the Series 90’s 30,000.

Behind the plastic-shielded doors, two women stand at a conveyor fluffing and peaking meringue pies by hand. A machine hasn’t been invented to produce the amply topped and peaked meringues the company is famous for, said Tim Dill, plant manager.

And a few steps away, baked pies are laid out in the research and development division, sliced and ready for tasting and other quality checks. Tasters recently gathered to offer their opinions on 114 possible new products.

Apple pie, as it was when the Bullocks opened their first restaurant, is the top seller.

“There are some occupational hazards to this job,” Dill said, patting his stomach under a white lab coat. Product development manager Ed Holtgraves agreed.

“But it’s a lot of fun in here,” Holtgraves added. “We are making our mark by having the highest-quality fruits in our pies and more of them.”

Willard said Plush Pippin is set to continue its fast expansion over the next few years. That success, he said, will depend on the company’s continued attention to detail.

“Baking is as much an art as it is a science,” he said. “There are lots of short cuts people can take, and we tend simply not to take them.”