Who Is The Real Marie Callender?

The Marie Callender’s brand is named for a real person. Marie Callender, the woman behind all those pies, might not have known they would become her life’s work when she started baking pies professionally in her early-40s (via Los Angeles Times ).

It grew into 84 locations by the end of the 1970s. In 1986, the restaurant chain was sold to Ramada Inn, then in 1990, to Wilshire Restaurant Group, Inc. Marie Callender Pie Shops, Inc. was purchased from Saunders Karp & Megrue (SKM) in 1999 by an affiliate of Castle Harlan, a New York-based private equity firm.

Sales of Marie Callender’s frozen desserts, dinners, and pot pies made $800 million annually as of 2011, making the name of this humble and hardworking baker from California one of the most valuable in the food world.

In the 1930s, Marie Callender, her husband Cal Warren Callender, and their son Don lived in a trailer park off Beach Boulevard in Huntington Beach.

Where is Marie Callender’s located?

Marie Callender’s is an American restaurant chain with 30 locations in California, Nevada, and Utah. Its headquarters are in the Marie Callender’s Corporate Support Center in Mission Viejo, Orange County, California.

On June 13, 2011, a total of 58 units were closed, including 31 Marie Callender’s and 27 Perkins Restaurant and Bakerys due to bankruptcy restructuring ( Chapter 11 ). During bankruptcy, PCMI sold the Marie Callender’s brand to ConAgra for US$57.5 million. Later that year, PMCI exited bankruptcy under the control of Wayzata Investment Partners.

In the 1930s , Marie Callender and her husband Cal Warren Callender began selling pies in the city of Long Beach and in Orange County. In 1948, they sold their family car and used the money to set up a wholesale bakery with their son Don. The first official location was opened in 1964.

In 2010, its cheesy chicken & rice meal was pulled due to a salmonella outbreak.

Marie Callender Pie Shops, Inc. was purchased from Saunders Karp & Megrue (SKM) in 1999 by an affiliate of Castle Harlan, a New York-based private equity firm.

Who is Marie Callender’s husband?

Marie Callender, her husband Cal, and their son Don had a surefire recipe for success: hard work and Marie’s pies. According to interviews with Marie and Don Callender in the Los Angeles Times, Don Callender would bake pies all night, and Cal would hit the streets to sell them wholesale during the day. “Everybody predicted we’d go broke, but we …

Another Los Angeles Times article, published in 1988, reported that Callender sued Ramada for not giving him any real power in the company. In any case, Ramada sold Marie Callender’s in 1990 to the Wilshire Restaurant Group, per the Houston Business Journal . As Funding Universe explained it, each transaction sent Marie Callender’s deeper in debt.

Shortly after she started working at a deli in Long Beach, California, the owner asked Callender to bake pies for his business. She found the work exhausting — baking dozens of pies a day and lugging 100-pound sacks of flour.

The past 15 years in the Marie Callender’s history hasn’t brought a lot of good news. The company merged with Perkins, another family restaurant chain, in 2006, according to Restaurant Business. Both chains had been growing at the time, but they started to perform poorly shortly after the merger.

Shutterstock. Don Callender agreed to sell the Marie Callender’s restaurant chain to Ramada after rejecting offers from Marriott and others, in part because the sale agreement kept Don in charge of the company for another five years, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The Marie Callender’s brand is named for a real person. Marie Callender, the woman behind all those pies, might not have known they would become her life’s work when she started baking pies professionally in her early-40s (via Los Angeles Times ). Shortly after she started working at a deli in Long Beach, California, …

Where was Marie Callender born?

Steered by hard work, persistence, and some luck, Marie Callender’s life is a classic American rags-to-riches story. Born in South Dakota in 1907, as a young girl she accompanied her poor but hardworking family when they moved to California in search of a better life.

American piemaker and businesswoman who turned a struggling business into a multimillion-dollar restaurant chain. Born in 1907 in South Dakota; died in Laguna Hills, California, on November 11, 1995; married Cal Callender, in 1924; children: one son, Donald Callender.

With this modest sum, Marie purchased an old oven and three rolling pins.

By the 1970s, the Callender family was in charge of a veritable empire of restaurants. Don’s marketing ability, along with Marie’s insistence on high quality in all items sold (particularly in the pies), resulted in a huge success for the precarious enterprise that had begun decades earlier in a Quonset Hut.

Determined to help his parents succeed, Don quit college to assist in the fledgling enterprise. The business grew only modestly for the next decade. In 1962, they moved into the retail food world with a small pie and coffee shop, called Marie Callender’s, on Tustin Avenue in Orange, California.

In 1986, Marie Callender proudly told a reporter that she always was certain that the quality of her pies was excellent: “everybody predicted we’d go broke, but we outlived ’em all. So we knew we had something better.”.

Quality control was maintained on an informal basis by Marie ; even in “retirement,” she continued to eat in a Marie Callender’s restaurant every so often and report any substandard pies or other items to her son, who was CEO of the chain.