NANTON, Alta. – When visitors walk into Carmen Ottaway’s Comfort Foods, the smell of beef roasting and pies baking stirs memories of trudging home on cold days to the nurturing warmth of mom’s home cooking.
That’s exactly how Ottaway and her partner Glen Norlander want people to feel. They sell homemade goodness in their fruit and shepherd’s pies to people who don’t have time to prepare meals “just like mom used to make.”
Using all Alberta beef, potatoes and carrots, every pie is made by hand with no added preservatives.
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“I don’t ever want to be a commercial producer,” said Ottaway, who works full time at the pie business while Norlander works as an engineer in Calgary.
Their entry into small-scale food processing is part of a Prairie value-adding trend that is creating wealth and jobs as the region’s food-producing sector moves from the simple sale of raw commodities.
Partners in life as well as business, Ottaway and Norlander never planned to become pie makers.
As graduate environmental science students who needed summer jobs in the mid-1980s, they started making and selling homemade pies at a Vavenby coffee shop on the highway linking Jasper and Kamloops.
Their shop turned out to be a major pit stop for bus tours and they could barely keep pace with the hordes of tourists hungry for homemade pie.
After graduation, they continued the pie business and started a shop in Bragg Creek, west of Calgary.
They’ve since moved to a shop in Calgary’s Eau Claire market, and last August bought the 10-employee Nanton processing plant to increase production of their meat and fruit pies. The Nanton plant had done time as a pizza company and beef jerky plant. Both ventures failed.
After six months in the value-added business, expansion is on the horizon with more staff and a bigger freezer.
Pies are sold at their Calgary pie store, frozen food outlets in Calgary, Costco and some Federated Co-operative stores. Financing came from relatives buying shares and a loan from Alberta Financial Services Corporation.
Nicknamed the Pie Lady by some of her university friends, Ottaway says she values the independence of having her own business even if the experience led to a few sleepless nights as she scaled the learning curve.
“There’s a lot of things we had to learn that aren’t written anywhere.”
Now, Ottaway said she could not imagine quitting the company to work for someone else.
“Its an enjoyable way of life but you have to live and breathe it.”
