Apple Pie

Baseball season was about to start, and I remembered an old kitchen mate who had been selling sandwiches in front of the ball park, and suddenly I got this idea that I could make apple pie. After doing a little research and finding no other competition, I started to do a little planning and wrote up a quick plan based upon quickly and simply getting up and running with very little startup costs. According to our calculations, we’d have to sell 200 pies/day to make a small profit, which with 80 games, added up to some $80,000, which seemed pretty good for 9 months. Plus, with one product that we’d mass produce, eventually we’d be a lot more efficient and it would get easier and easier to make the pies. Once those were stabilized, we could venture onto new products.

I hired some temporary help to produce the pies, and we made some 100 pies the first day, since they took a lot longer than we had hoped; but that seemed ok and it’s always better to sell out than make too much and have to throw product away. However, unfortunately, those big dreams ended in sadness as we only sold 20 pies the first day, and gave the rest away. The second day we sold 12, and the third day I think we only sold 10. There were a number of things going on. Number 1 was people weren’t going to games since the Mariners weren’t winning. Number 2 was people didn’t really like new things at the games (although the Shishka-Berries, chocolate dipped strawberries on a stick did quite well). Number 3 was that people didn’t understand the idea of a small pie for $5 when you could buy a HUGE pie at Costco for almost the same price. Clearly, baseball fans were not our target market, and even if we did eventually reach our goal, we would be losing about $500/day to get there, and by our estimations we’d be well into the following year before that would be possible. So we cancelled the big Apple Pie venture. To be honest, loading the van, setting up and then packing, loading and unloading the van again every day was a lot of tedious work so it was a relief not to have to worry about that anymore.

Unfortunately, my temporary help had to be let go as well, as her position was going to be paid by the apple pie proceeds. That was too bad because she really wanted it to work. Luckily, she landed a great job at a cool bakery south of Seattle.