Australia’s pie market booming as Pie Face hunts for buyer

In January, a receiver for the debt-ridden pie chain, which has stores in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland, announced it was heading towards profitability and would soon be sold.

Interest in its acquisition will no doubt be bolstered by the news that the number of Australians who eat pies and pasties has grown from 8.1m to almost 9.4m people since 2013. 

Pie lovers are more likely to live in rural areas than capital cities, while South Australia was named as the country’s pie heartland—though not in Adelaide, the home of the “pie floater​”, according to a survey by Roy Morgan Research. 

“Amid reports that Pie Face is on the verge of being sold, it’s interesting to see that South Australia is home to the country’s highest proportion of pie lovers, but perhaps the new owners should consider expanding beyond the east coast​,” speculated Roy Morgan’s Norman Morris. 

“Furthermore, Pie Face’s stores tend to be in capital cities, with more than half their stores located in Sydney, a city whose residents are less likely to enjoy eating pies/pasties than anywhere else in Australia​.” 

According to Roy Morgan’s data, a move into key rural areas might bear fruit for the chain, he added.

The data also confirms that sport and pies are a match made in heaven, and it is no coincidence that pie brand Four’n Twenty sponsors three AFL and two NRL teams, with fans of both codes having an above-average appreciation of pies and pasties.

Curiously, an even higher percentage of A-League soccer supporters (58.5%) are pie fans, though none of the league’s 10 teams have a pie-related sponsor.

“Of course, nobody would be surprised to learn that pie fans are predominantly male, or likely to be supporters of the three main football codes​,” Morris added. 

“After all, buying a pie while at a match is almost obligatory, a fact clearly not lost on AFL/NRL sponsor Four’n Twenty​.”