Could pot pie unify a divided country?
Sasha Millstein certainly thinks so. Aunt Ethel’s Pot Pies provides something familiar, something that cuts across all political denominations: the comfort of a warm, filling, homemade chicken pot pie. From any brand manager’s point of view, selling pot pies sounds like a fool-proof plan to start a successful catering or cottage business. But Millstein has her eyes set on bigger things, starting with reinventing how we prepare pot pies.
Packaging Innovation and Nutrition All At Once
Aunt Ethel’s Pot Pies is already based on a pretty well-known line of pot pies that Millstein’s aunt has been selling exclusively as part of a catering business she’s been successfully running out of Staten Island for the past 30 years.
Millstein plans to bring these pies to a larger market by making them accessible to anyone anywhere anytime. Anybody who has ever tried to prepare a pot pie knows that’s a tall order, considering the work that goes into making one.
“When we started to look at the pot pie industry, we realized there were two major pain points,” explains Millstein, “One of them was that the crust on the bottom and the sides always seemed to get soggy and overcooked. The other major pain point is that it usually took another 45 or 60 minutes to heat up in the oven.”
Millstein came up with an innovative concept that hits those two proverbial birds with one stone. Inspired by yogurt bowls that keep the granola fresh by separating it from the yogurt, Millstein decided to innovate Aunt Ethel’s Pot Pies by separating the crust from the filling.
“You could place the crust in the toaster for 30 seconds and take the bowl with the filling in it and place it in the microwave for 3–4 minutes. And then place the crust back on the bowl and dig in!”
Millstein believes this is what makes Aunt Ethel’s Pot Pies an ideal meal-to-go. Not just for anyone working from home who doesn’t necessarily have time to take off for lunch, but also for kids with equally overbooked schedules.
“I remember eating bagels, bagel dogs, and top ramen — they were food that I could prepare in five minutes before I had to change to go to softball practice or track, or whatever it is,” Millstein reminisces.
Aunt Ethel’s Pot Pies is certainly a much healthier option. Hormone-free, antibiotic-free, organic, and the chicken, slow-roasted and hand-pulled.
Millstein talks about working with a recipe formulator and a Michelin chef to help scale her aunt’s recipe for retail, while keeping it nutritionally viable.
Whether it’s kids of adults, Millstein says Aunt Ethel’s Pot Pies is “something they can prepare where they feel like they’re cooking a little bit, and they can also feel good about making.”
From Pop-Ups to Pandemic
Business-wise, Millstein says the year has had it’s up and downs. Back in March, when they first rolled out Aunt Ethel’s Pot Pies at a pop-up, it became clear just how viable the pot pies were as a retail product.
“We had debated whether or not to start opening up a line of brick-and-mortar stores, or go down the retail route. At our first pop-up, we sold out,” Millstein retells, “For every Aunt Ethel’s Pot Pie that people ate in-store, they took home between 5 to 7 to go. We realized right at that point that this was a retail item.”
But as the pandemic spread, it affected a lot of the key distribution channels that Millstein was relying on. A cafe they partnered up with went out of business ten days after making their first order.
Not everything was lost, though. The chaos of the pandemic has allowed Millstein to go back to the drawing board and focus on building up the organization and finding new channels of distribution.
“I’d say we were actually lucky,” says Millstein optimistically. She was able to work closely with experts in the consumer packaged goods industry who would have otherwise been inaccessible or busy in a more normal year.
“They were all working from home through Zoom. They helped me understand the industry better, everything that they did wrong, everything they did right, and everything they wish they would have known,”
Millstein has also had more time to act on consumer feedback. With less opportunities to conduct demos or taste-testing, Millstein personally went to bars to interview customers. She has also hired a social media manager to make sure that she can work closer with her customer base.
“We really want to build a community of engagement where people feel like their opinions matter,” explains Millstein.”
“You really have to start listening to other people to really figure out what people out there want because I realized that after all these years, buying products and seeing products, you won’t really know what the rest of the country wants until you ask.”
Millstein is working to put Aunt Ethel’s Pot Pies on the map in the next year to five, serving cafes, bars and grocery shelves in the Tri-State Area. More than that, she hopes the business can be a stepping stone for something much larger.
“I’ve been doing angel investing with 37 angels for the past five years. My 20 year plan is to have an exit, and to build a microfinancing organization and to invest in women who haven’t had the same resources and opportunities.”
“You know you have to have purpose,” she explains, “You can’t just be about the bottom line. I’d like to believe we’re building this company for a much larger process.
Read the complete interview here.
CTA — This interiew is part of Staff Street’s Mover’s Spotlight, an interview series that highlights how business owners and CEOs are navigating the challenges and uncertainty of the COVID-19 year.
