Pair partner up to offer savory treats
NEW BREMEN — The New Bremen New Knoxville Rotary Club arrived at The Pie Shell in New Bremen to celebrate its recent cooperation with Tin Acre Gourmet Popcorn.
Meeting at the bakery, the club listened to owner Susan Krieg and Abby Balster of Tin Acre talk about their respective businesses and how they came to work together on their recent project. The two have some very similar experiences getting their businesses off the ground, despite doing so at different times.
Krieg was the first to officially start her business, something she hadn’t planned at all in the beginning. Before she even thought about making pies for a living, she simply started out at home making pies for her family.
“What I did was bought a pie, freshly married at two months, and I served to my husband in my house,” Krieg explained. This led to her being asked an important question. “And he said, ‘Can you make one?’”
It took some experimenting and time, but she eventually became known as the pie person for her husband’s family. As she went on making them over the next couple of
years until she joined a pie-making contest, getting second place. She soon met a few friends and she eventually started working with restaurants and making her pies for them.
Eventually, though, she would start to make her own name by herself.
“So, I quit my job baking for restaurants and started doing garage sales to get my name out,” Krieg stated. It took a while to get any traction. “[The] first garage sale, I made 12 pies. It took me from Wednesday to Saturday to sell all but one of them.”
However, things did change over the years and more people started coming to those garage sales.
Five years later, she sold 266 pies and sold out before she had to go for a cheer competition. Eventually, The Pie Shell was born and has been in operation till this day.
Balster was in a very similar situation when she started to hone her craft. Starting out in her home as well, she was just trying to make some extra cash when her friends told her it would be a good idea to sell her popcorn. Despite some hesitation, she decided to go for it.
“So one day I was like, “Write down a business program, present it to your husband,’” Balster said. Her husband was stated to be her “big numbers guy” by Balster, so she did her best to convince him first. “[I] wasn’t really sure where I was going [and] landed a job with a business management leadership training company in February of 2020.”
Of course, that job didn’t last long with the pandemic hitting everyone all at once. After spending the summer with her children, Balster did eventually get restless and started to believe that selling her popcorn would be a good idea since it worked out so well before. The actual turn to business was a slow one.
“We expanded to a couple of stores I was in, I was doing farmer’s markets, and I was like, ‘What now?’” Balster asked herself and while she hadn’t meant for things to get so big, the train had been moving already. “I kept stopping from myself from growing because I was waiting for that other job to come along.”
Eventually Balster and her husband simply decided that since they were doing well, they would continue going forward. Tin Acres formed much like Krieg’s business, which led the two to meet.
As of now, the two are collaborating, with Balster supplying the savory chicken and waffle flavor to the bakery.
They are both excited to launch this project together and are looking forward to a happy working relationship in the future.
For more information on either business, feel free to visit their websites at ThePieShell.com and TinAcre.com.