What Happened Marie Callender?

“Marie died in 1995. Did she put it in your oven and you just now took it out? The audacity.” “Thanks to Marie Callender, my wife left, took the kids, the house and even the dog and all I have left is the credit card debt she put us in”

Marie Callender’s, the beloved Southern California-born pie purveyor, has struggled for years. There have been bankruptcies, corporate mergers and splits, and the selling of its trademark to corporate behemoth Conagra Foods, which sells more lucrative frozen meals under the Marie Callender’s name.

One woman’s knack for baking pies would eventually inspire a restaurant chain and a line of frozen foods. The Marie Callender’s brand is named for a real person.

On August 5, 2019, 29 stores were closed and the holding company for Perkins and Marie Callender’s filed bankruptcy. The chains were later split apart, with Perkins being bought by Huddle House, while Marie Callender’s was sold to a company known as Marie Callender’s Inc. for US$1.75 million.

What happened to Marie Callender’s?

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.

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.

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 sold Marie Callender’s?

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.

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 …

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, …