No longer pie in the sky
New ownership brought Table Talk back from the brink. Now, it’s in expansion mode.
All the ingredients are on the table at Table Talk Pies: a new president with bold plans, an additional manufacturing line that’s nearing completion, an acquisition of an erstwhile competitor’s factory in Canada. There’s talk of new fruit flavors and different kinds of desserts, as well as the introduction of pot pies for the frozen-food aisles in supermarkets.
But here’s what’s most interesting about the Worcester-based pie maker right now: The company is doing all this to expand, roughly a year after it came close to shutting down.
Table Talk is a beloved brand in New England, but few people knew how close the century-old company came to baking its last serving. By early 2022, just after the company relocated to a new flagship factory, its production had fallen to one-fifth of prepandemic volume. The cost of supplies and materials had shot up significantly. So did the cost of debt. Table Talk was having trouble paying its bills. It needed help, and fast.
Enter Cliff Rucker, the owner of the Worcester Railers minor league hockey team. Rucker is a North Shore businessman who became enmeshed in Worcester civic affairs and development after launching the Railers about seven years ago. He knew Table Talk’s importance to the city: It employs several hundred people at its two plants in Worcester and one in Shrewsbury, and is a regional point of pride, much like Polar Beverages. When Rucker heard about Table Talk’s troubles, he knew he had to step in to help.
“Table Talk is a really treasured asset in the community,” he said. “[But] I don’t think people in the community were aware of the precipice upon which Table Talk was sitting.”
Rucker connected with Harry Kokkinis, then the president and primary owner. Then, Rucker reached out to some business associates to see if they would invest in Table Talk. The eventual group of investors included Anthony and Matt Consigli, brothers who run Consigli Construction, and Jim Chacharone, who developed the new factory for Table Talk on Gardner Street. The infusion of capital diluted the shares owned by the Kokkinis family but provided an important lifeline. Chacharone, who owns two of Table Talk’s three factories, forgave some of the rent he was owed in return for equity, while also investing additional funds into the business.
Anthony Consigli remembers being initially skeptical about the venture.
“I can’t cook an egg,” he said later. “I know nothing about pies.”
But the Consigli brothers remembered how their mom would consistently pack a 4-inch Table Talk snack pie for their dad as part of the lunch he took to work on construction sites. Anthony Consigli said that memory prompted his brother to prod him to kick in some dough, and to offer some business expertise.
“Cliff and one of our guys went in with Harry, met with the vendors, came up with a plan, and got everybody some money,” Anthony Consigli said. “It basically gave them enough capital to pay enough of the vendors, that they started sending supplies again . ... Table Talk was such a big employer. We didn’t want to see it go. [And] it’s third generation, we really respect that.”
Now, Table Talk is turning a healthy profit again. Another bakery, Pâtisserie Gaudet in a small town an hour east of Montreal, was not as fortunate, and filed for bankruptcy protection. Table Talk acquired its assets and is preparing to reopen its plant, under the business name Table Talk Canada. Table Talk’s new ownership also quickly decided to invest in a fourth piemaking line — a “hybrid” line that can make smaller snack pies or larger dessert pies. It is being installed this summer at the Gardner Street plant, and will be completed in August in time for the busy season in the fall.
“The mentality the partners brought to this from day one is: We are not going to fail,” Rucker said. “Harry checked his ego at the door when brought the partners in. He allowed us to thrive together.”
Earlier this year, the group also brought in Isaac Long, from the Consigli family office, Truck 9 Partners, as a strategic adviser. Then, last month, Long was appointed president, to oversee day-to-day operations. Kokkinis became executive chairman.
Despite its familiarity to New Englanders, the Table Talk brand is essentially unknown in most other parts of the country, Long said. That’s largely because most of Table Talk’s revenue comes from selling private label versions of its pies to supermarket chains and other retailers.
More than 300 people work at the company today, but Long expects that may exceed 350 as the fall approaches. Long is eyeing new markets: the big foodservice providers and the schools and hospitals they serve, for instance.
He’s also looking at other products, such as crumb cakes and brownies, that can be made with Table Talk’s equipment, with the hopes of broadening Table Talk’s presence on bakery shelves in grocery stores. And he’s rethinking the pie lineup, in part by exploring the possibility of selling frozen pot pie-style meals.
“Over the course of the next couple of years, we’d like to be expanding the product portfolio outside of the traditional pie,” Long said.
This isn’t the first time that Table Talk came close to going out of business. The founding families sold the company in the mid-1960s, and it suffered in the early 1980s under the ownership of a leveraged buyout firm, according to a history penned by Babson College management professor Peter Cohan. Kokkinis’s father eventually bought the business, bringing ownership back to his family, and Kokkinis joined his dad about two decades ago.
As for Kokkinis, he remains actively involved, as an investor and executive. And he’s relieved that the business that has been in his family for most of the last century is in expansion mode again after such a close call.
“Here we are, a year later, we’re back to being profitable,”
Kokkinis said. “The lifeline that the investors threw us was so instrumental in terms of turning around the company, I will forever be grateful for what they did.”