Baking & Snack - June 2024 - 30

JTM FOODS
" WE'RE PIE EVANGELISTS. WE'RE
EXPANDING OUR PORTFOLIO, BUT AT THE
END OF THE DAY, WE ARE ALL ABOUT
HANDHELD SNACK PIES. "
Monty Pooley, JTM Foods
they consider themselves to be pie evangelists.
" If we're not out advocating for this category, the category,
like many, will basically vacillate, it won't move, "
Pooley explained. " When you talk about the category
and educate and inform, it's like, 'Oh I didn't realize
what this could mean for me as a retailer and how appealing
it is to consumers' and the kind of profitability it
can provide for them at a really terrific value. "
Larry Bilello, chief commercial officer, agreed, emphasizing
that JTM is passionate about pie.
" There's a category story, and wherever there's a story
for sales and profits, we get invited to participate, " he
said. " So we have to make that story for snack pies and
we do. That's our role. We have something that has velocity,
sales and profit margin for the customer. Typically,
those things keep you listed in a store. "
JTM sells both frozen and fresh pies. Frozen pies can
be kept in the freezer for 120 days and then 21 days after
they thaw. Ambient pies will last 40 to 65 days, depending
on the filling. Ensuring that pies have a good seal
so the filling doesn't leak is key to a successfully made
handheld pie, which can be tricky.
" When things go a little bit wrong, it can get really
messy really fast. That's a genuine challenge, " Pooley said.
" A big part of success is to manage the moisture in that
filling so that it doesn't compromise the crust. We want
the filling to not be overly viscous. If you're not managing
that really well, which is again a fairly hard thing to
do, that product can come out and be disappointing. "
Carpenter
said
30 Baking & Snack June 2024 / www.bakingbusiness.com
Pies are fried, glazed, then travel to the ambient spiral cooler.
Wichita brought some challenges as employees
learned the equipment and best practices for handling
the ingredients.
" When we started, not all of our equipment was technically
ready for us, so we used some manual wrappers
that we had to hand feed, " he said. " They were doing a
good job with it, but with that there's a lot of waste, a lot
of wasted pie, a lot of wasted packaging. "
But once all the new equipment arrived, production
smoothed out and waste is back to a minimum. Waste
management has been an important tenet for JTM over
the past six to seven years, which has reduced waste 60%
to 70% over that time.
" The reduction of waste has been a real priority for
us for all the right reasons, " Pooley said. " Nobody likes
to see - whether it's ingredients, whether it's materials
- going on the floor and going into a landfill. Just the
way we manage waste has changed dramatically. The
systems that we use to track that waste and understand
what the cause of that waste is has also evolved. When
we better understand the data and what the cause is, we
can fix it. "
Amboyer said the company is running at 3% waste
now, which he said is good but not where the company
wants to be. He provided an example of how the team
works together to reduce waste. The Wichita line was
losing parts of the pastries but an adjustment eliminated
the problem.
" Those little wins make a huge difference, and the
waste number goes down, the throughput number goes
up, " Amboyer said.
Consistency is key to the success of the pie-making
operation, which is also one of the most challenging
the beginning of production in
parts of the business.
" We're constantly learning new things to check every
day, " Amboyer said. " The strive for quality never ends.
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Baking & Snack - June 2024

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