Cantabrians Abroad / Jamie Scott is taking Canada by storm with his savoury pie business
A craving for a taste of home led to Jamie Scott launching a New Zealand-style savoury pie business in the chilly heart of Alberta, Canada.
Roast turkey with peas, corn, mashed potatoes and gravy. The holiday season looms so Jamie Scott is thinking about seasonal flavours. He grew up in Christchurch with days full of beaches and barbecues at this time of year, but now Jamie’s half a world away in Edmonton and things are a little different. His home for the past decade is famous for its legendary Wayne Gretzky-led ice hockey team in the 1980s, and in winter the daytime temperature regularly drops below minus 10 degrees Celsius. Sometimes as low as minus 30 degrees, or lower.
‘I do miss the Kiwi winter, as well as the ocean,’ says
Jamie with a chuckle, after mentioning things he loves about Edmonton, such as its proximity to the Canadian Rockies or mountain biking for hours across a green belt that follows the North Saskatchewan River through the heart of the city. ‘The winters here, well if you’ve gone through minus 20, minus 25, and you get to minus five or minus 10 it’s actually a really nice day, which sounds a bit funny.’
And in such cold weather, you want some delicious hot food. Over the past few years, Jamie has provided just that for his fellow Edmontonians, launching the South Island Pie Co. which has grown from a part-time market stall to a full-time business with its own factory, distributing Kiwi-style pies into speciality stores and gastropubs.
‘I just really wanted to bring our pie culture to Canada,’ says Jamie, reminiscing on why he first set up his pie stand at an historic farmers’ market in Edmonton back in 2013. ‘I felt like Canadians were missing out, and I’d run into other Kiwis, so I just felt I might as well do it.’
It’s been an adventure, with Jamie’s beard freezing at his stall in winter, and once having to push his chest-high pie freezer along icy city footpaths when the van broke down in the cold.
Jamie first visited Canada in 2006, after earning an apprenticeship at F Cartwright & Sons and working in the Christchurch print industry. He wanted to travel the world, and a good mate was living in Edmonton, so he visited. ‘I missed meat pies and started making them for myself and my roommates, and they loved them,’ says Jamie. ‘The first time I started making them, I just bought pastry from the store, got the tins, and I’d phone my mum and nana up and get a couple of recipes and sort of twist them here and there.’
He’d always loved his mum’s homemade bacon and egg pie as well as bakery-style gourmet pies (Burwood Bakery was a hometown favourite) and early on in Canada he thought about making it a business. ‘But I was only going to be there for that summer.’
Life swerved when Jamie met Janice, the Edmontonian who became his wife. She was an engineer who was already planning a New Zealand trip, and the couple ended up bouncing between Canada and New Zealand the next couple of years, before settling in Edmonton where Jamie kept working in the print industry. But his pie dreams wouldn’t fade.
‘I finally decided to pull the trigger on starting the business in 2013,’ he says. ‘I knew if I didn’t do it, I was just going to end up retiring a grumpy old man because I’d had this dream and hadn’t done it. I realised there was never going to be a perfect time to start the business.’
Initially, Jamie worked on South Island Pie Co. outside his work hours and on weekends, but as his Kiwi-style savoury pies grew in popularity he started working part-time, two or three days a week, then kept scaling back his print industry work as his side business scaled up.
South Island Pie Co. offers a range that nods to both Jamie’s antipodean roots and local ingredients and palates. Over the years they’ve included recognisable flavours like steak and cheese, steak and mushroom, mince, potato and ale, and ‘The Chook’ (chicken, cranberry, and camembert), as well as a Moose pie, and others with a Canadian twist.
‘We’ve got our regular line-up, then we have limited edition pies where I can have a bit of fun and try a bunch of flavours,’ says Jamie. ‘We did a poutine pie, which is really Canadian. It’s got fries and cheese curds on top. We’ve done a ton of different ones, like smoked salmon with dill, cream cheese and capers.’
The enthusiasm in Jamie’s voice is clear as he talks about pies.
‘Right from the first day we were pretty much selling out every weekend at the City Market,’ he says. ‘A lot of people were coming up to our stall and it was intriguing to them. They’d ask questions and want to know more. The Kiwis and Aussies, and people who’d travelled to New Zealand and Australia and tried pies while they were down there, would buy straight away. Then people who like to try different foods, the foodies, they’d try them as well.’
Some market customers returned every week to buy a dozen pies.
The biggest challenge with South Island Pie Co., says Jamie, is scaling his business up to meet the growing demand and reach more taste buds. They began with the market stall and online sales from their website. ‘Then we got into a few stores, then were doing big trade shows, and now we’re at the point we’re still doing trade shows, selling online, still got the market space, and we have 20–30 stores that sell our pies in Edmonton and Calgary, a pub in Calgary that sells them hot, and another place that’s going to start selling them hot this week.’
A couple of years ago Jamie merged his business with a gourmet Asian dumpling business; they share staff, insurance, a production facility, and are setting up a storefront. Expanding further requires big investment, due to Canadian laws related to sending meat products across provincial borders. ‘If we were in Ontario it would be a lot easier to scale our business up just within the one province as there are hundreds of niche stores to sell into, where in Alberta there might be 50 to 60,’ says Jamie. ‘We’re currently going through an investment round and trying to raise 5 million to take our business to the next level.’
Canadians, it seems, can’t get enough of Kiwi-style pies.
‘A lot of people were coming up to our stall and it was intriguing to them. They’d ask questions and want to know more.’