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Alum has a lot of crust — and filling — to feed UT diners, fans |
| By
Cynthia Nowak |
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Sep 6, 2007 |
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UT students, staff, faculty and alumni are sinking their teeth into an alumnus success story. No worries, mate — there’ll be plenty of Crikey’s Genuine Australian Pies to go round. Corporate vice president and chief operating officer Purri Gould (Bus ’04) will see to it.
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| Lynne and Purri Gould posed for a photo near the assembly line at the North Toledo site where Crikey's Australian Pies are made. |
The Australian-born Gould is making his mark with the meaty comestibles baked in Toledo and carried in a widening swathe of grocery freezer cases nationwide — and now, thanks to an arrangement with AVI Food Service, at Rocky’s Scoreboard Grill and the International House convenience store on Main Campus, and at all home football games this season.
“It’s awesome!” Purri said. “I’m stoked about it, especially about being at the Rockets games. You know, during Australian football’s Grand Final, about 25,000 meat pies are sold. Now here’s Crikey’s having a go at UT sports.”
And don’t make the mistake of thinking that an Aussie pie is a Down Under version of that familiar American staple, the aluminum-bottom frozen potpie. Purri’s mother, Lynne, Crikey’s president and CEO, explained, “You won’t find all the gravies like the potpies here, and Aussie pies are eaten with your hands.”
Purri added, “They’re complete meals. In Australia, the meat pie is as common as the hot dog, the hamburger or the pizza here.”
The hand-crafted Crikey’s Pies will be available in their most popular flavors, said Tony Sloan, director of retail operations for AVI Foodsystems Inc. “We’ll have sirloin-mushroom, chicken-broccoli and of course the classic ground-beef shepherd’s pie.”
Sloan added, “AVI Fresh is proud to announce another superb partnership with an outstanding vendor. We believe it is a privilege and a honor to have Crikey’s Australian Pies join us as we endeavor to be the finest in the platinum standard of products at The University of Toledo. Our expectation is a long and fruitful partnership with the highest in customer satisfaction.”
To explain how Crikey’s jumped the Pacific, it’s necessary to go back to 2001, when the Gould family was living in Perth, Australia. Purri was attending Murdoch University. “I had just switched from engineering to marketing,” he said. “Dad came home one day and said after 20 years, he wanted to live closer to his aging parents. So we’re going to America. I thought, ‘No worries, I’ll come over and have a look.’ I was enjoying marketing, and America is the most famous marketer in the world.”
He enrolled in UT’s College of Business Administration; extracurricular-wise, he was living a crash course in American culture and climate. “We moved in December, which is summer in Perth, so to come from where it’s pushing 110 degrees to the Chicago airport was an adjustment.” Since then, Purri acquired the appropriate attitude toward winter.
Still, something was missing — even aside from Perth’s crescent of ocean-side beaches. He said, “I was homesick, I think, for a bit of Perth when I said to mum, ‘Why don’t we bring a piece of Australia here?’” That’s when he and Lynne began thinking pies.
Lynne said, “We thought that America is great at taking foods from all over the world and adapting them into its popular culture, but there was nothing Australian.”
Thus was born Crikey’s — first at a bakery in Toledo’s Woodville Mall, then in a rented portion of a church kitchen, now in a north Toledo facility that formerly housed a catering company. “We took out walls, put in new floors and a roof, and built an extension,” Purri said. “Mum and I planned the layout for 18 months, based on what we’d learned about production.”
What they learned, he said, took them from dough punchers to front officers: “We went from making pies by hand to this bakery where, if we’re at full production, 24/7, three shifts, the output is a million pies in a month.”
The Kroger Co.’s Ohio stores were the Goulds’ first major marketing coup, but they’ve added Wal-Mart stores in the Southeast. In fact, the latter’s vice president was so impressed with the product he sampled at a trade show that he gave the Goulds the OK without the customary presentation.
“Only 2 percent of people who present to Wal-Mart get in, and we didn’t even have to present — we were lucky!” Purri said.
Though such success makes them a rising name, the Goulds aren’t dreaming of supersizing their bakery. “A big small company is our goal,” Purri said. “We want to get known as a little guy who’s still using a bakery process.”
The move to Purri’s alma mater is an important part of that goal, he added. “This is where we wanted to go all along, adapting traditional Australian food to American culture.”
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