Past Graduates

Valley View Orchard Pies

Jim Kroitzsh likes a good piece of pie for breakfast. And another with his coffee break. Obviously he's not the only one. This year, June to June, Kroitzsh, the premier piemaker in Maine, expects to sell 150,000 of his Valley View Orchard Pies, both wholesale and through his new trial outlet in Portland's Public Market.

The Market is a test facility for Kroitzsh who is thinking of franchising. And his test is panning out. In October, his first month in the Market, business was about 50% above break-even. That figure went to 60-70% in November. But things weren't always so rosy. The apple market hasn't been friendly to growers the last few years, says Kroitzsh, a 1997 FastTrac graduate. "We quickly saw the handwriting on the wall. We weren't going to make it without a value-added product." They went back to their old customers in New Hampshire to test their interest in renewing accounts, and started delivering 25 to 50 pies a week.

"When we first started making pies," says Kroitzsh, "we did it at our kitchen table. My mother was an excellent piemaker, my grandmother was a top piemaker. We made apple dumplings, apple fritters, apple cider doughnuts. We hired a baker in New Hampshire, but then we only did six to eight varieties of pies."

Last summer when Gordon's Top of the Tree pies (sold frozen to supermarkets) moved its piemaking operation from New Hampshire to Canada, Kroitzsh bought all of the ovens, a $32,000 apple peeler (which can peel up to 20 bushels per hour) and all of the pans and racks. He modernized the bakery and planned for the Public Market. Contributing to his success, says Kroitzsh, was the decision to take the FastTrac 2 course offered by the Center for Entrepreneurship and Small Business at the University of Southern Maine. "We were looking for a substantial loan. We had a proposal written but we went to one bank that said they were really hesitant about the Portland Public Market because there was no track
record of a public market in Maine or New Hampshire."

"Once I took the course," says Kroitzsh, "they started taking notice of the numbers I brought. The numbers were real. The way I approached the loan process was real. It made the difference. I got the money. As a matter of fact, the market was ready and we had to start building before the loan actually went through. The bank started advancing me money on the loan I would be getting. That's how much FastTrac pushed it along."

The whole Kroitzsh family works in some capacity in the business. Jim's wife, Jean, does the paperwork; one son manages the Hebron facility; a second son runs a web page division at EMC company in Massachusetts but finds time to keep the computers in order; and the Kroitzsh's daughter, a graphic design major at Alfred University, provides the graphics.

With only 20 employees, the pie orders keep coming. Valley View produced 6,000 for Thanksgiving alone. "That was overwhelming," says Kroitzsh.

Written by Shirley Jacks for Mainebiz, February 1999.

Condensed version reprinted with permission by
Mainebiz publisher Donna Brassard.