8 Facts About Marie Callender's Few Shoppers Know

Whether you're reaching for a frozen dessert after dinner or a chicken pot pie on a cold winter evening, Marie Callender's has become synonymous with comforting, homestyle food. Though the brand produces a relatively wide range of products today, Marie Callender's frozen pies are easily its biggest claim to fame. This makes sense, considering the eponymous Callender got her start baking pies for local Southern California restaurants back in the 1940s.

Today, the brand extends from the frozen food aisles to a regional chain of full-service restaurants. But while Marie Callender's is a household name, few shoppers know much about the company, such as the founder's rags-to-riches story or its charitable contributions. So if you're a foodie and trivia buff, cut yourself a slice of your favorite Marie Callender's pie and read on to learn about the brand, the restaurants, and the woman who started it all. By the end, you'll have plenty of fun facts to regale your mother-in-law with when she pulls the turtle pie out of the freezer this holiday season.

Marie Callender was born in 1907 in South Dakota. She moved with her family to California and married her husband, Cal, when the pair were both 17. After making pies for a local delicatessen, she launched her own baking business in 1948. She passed away at age 88 in 1995, but her memory lives on through her carefully constructed businesses, including both a restaurant chain and a frozen food line.

If you don't live in the Western United States, you may not even be aware that Marie Callender's operates restaurants, but at one time, the eateries were a booming business, with well over 100 restaurants in operation at their peak. Today, that count is under 30, but the cozy bistros can still be found — primarily in California, but a few are sprinkled throughout Nevada, Idaho, and Utah as well.

Marie Callender's frozen pies are the best-known items from the prepared foods brand, including both sweet and savory pot pie varieties, but the line also includes frozen meal bowls, full TV-style dinners, and large-batch meals. It's unclear exactly when the company began producing prepared foods, but the right to manufacture and sell food products under the Marie Callender brand name was sold to Conagra Brands in 1994, and Conagra has steered the ship ever since.  

When Marie Callender took a part-time job prepping salads, snacks, and treats for a small deli, she probably wasn't looking to start her own business, but that's exactly what happened. The man who owned the deli also owned a snack bar and a bakery in Long Beach, and asked Callender to bake pies to sell at his shops. Callender told the Los Angeles Times that "I didn't know anything about making pies like that. One Saturday, I made 100-plus pies myself. And I was dragging around 100-pound sacks of flour. So I told this man, Mr. Black, 'I'm going to quit this because I don't know what I'm doing, and I'm tired.'" 

It was Mr. Black's reply that lit the match. As Callender reported, "He said: 'Well, why don't you take the oven, start a pie business yourself, and I'll buy pies from you?'" The rest was history. With the support of her husband, Cal, and son, Don, Marie Callender got to work. Before long, her homemade pies were being distributed to local restaurants and delis whose owners wanted a piece of the proverbial and literal pie. 

The origin story of Marie Callender's pies isn't exactly glamorous. Any entrepreneur knows that finding startup funds is one of the peskiest growing pains for a new business. As much as Callender wanted to get the pie business off the ground, she didn't have the necessary workspace and equipment — or the money to buy them. The Callenders weren't particularly wealthy, but they did have one valuable possession that wasn't a strict need: They'd recently purchased a brand-new Chevrolet. Thankfully, Cal Callender was all-in on Marie's dream, and the couple sold the car in 1948 with the intention of using the profits to jump-start the bakery. After paying the necessary household bills, they had about $700 left over.

With the cash infusion from the car sale, Marie and Cal were able to buy some basic baking supplies and rent a small workspace in Long Beach. Marie, Cal, and Don Callender all worked like dogs to keep things running smoothly — at one point, they were baking close to 200 pies per day. In 1986, Marie recalled to the LA Times that "there were only three of us, and there were no machines. We had three rolling pins and this old oven, and we used to work all night." On top of that, Cal spent his days selling pies to restaurant owners, and Don was out delivering on his bike until Marie was able to procure a delivery truck. Business for the wholesale bakery was steady, but there wasn't much profit in it ... until Don Callender picked up the torch.

Don Callender was involved in the business from an early age, and while he attended college for a short time, he soon returned to his parents to help out at the bakery. Recognizing how little profit the bakery pulled in, Don urged his parents to think bigger. Ultimately, he convinced them to open up a coffee and pie shop in Orange, California, in the early 1960s, which became a smashing success, partly thanks to Don's proposal of offering a free cup of joe and a slice of pie to first-time visitors. They stuck the ovens near the cafe's windows to entice passersby to stop in for a slice. Simple promotional tactics, but they worked — and, of course, the scrumptious pies spoke for themselves.

With the restaurant's continued success, Don advocated for further expansion. Soups and sandwiches were added to the menu within a few years of the Orange shop's grand opening, followed by additional full-service Marie Callender's restaurants. Things kept snowballing until, by the end of the 1970s, there were a whopping 84 locations. Don was also responsible for the $90 million sale of the restaurant chain to Ramada Corp in 1986. Despite selling the business, Don's entrepreneurial spirit and love of the restaurant world remained, and he went on to found a number of fun themed restaurants and a small barbecue chain before his death in 2009.

Delicious pies aren't the only wholesome offering from Marie Callender's. The brand's restaurants also give back to the community by fundraising for schools and nonprofits. The Whole Pie program allows nonprofits and schools to purchase select whole pies from the restaurants for $14.99 and resell them for $2-6 more apiece — a tidy profit if enough pies are sold. Who wouldn't want to purchase a scratch-made pie to support a good cause? Meanwhile, the Dine In for Dollars initiative lets schools and nonprofits book dine-in events at a local Marie Callender's restaurant. A portion of the proceeds generated that night is then donated to the school or organization — a win-win, since it's also bringing in business for the restaurant.

Additionally, Marie Callender's offers a handful of free programs to aid local students and their schools directly. With Appetite for Reading, Marie Callender's offers a free kids' meal to students who read three books. The Award for Excellence Certificate program gives certificates to students for their academic achievements, which can then be exchanged for a kids' meal (or a burger meal for teenagers) at a local outpost. Finally, teachers are eligible for Marie Callender's Teacher Appreciation Card, which scores them a 15% discount at Marie Callender's restaurants and can be used as often as they like.

The Marie Callender's name has since changed hands after Don Callender first sold it to Ramada. The frozen food line has been owned by Conagra Brands since 1994 and is, technically, a completely separate business from Marie Callender's restaurants, despite how they originate from the same place. Conagra is one of the most recognizable names in the food business. It's the powerhouse behind household name brands like Slim Jim, Duncan Hines, Gardein, and Boomchickapop, to name just a few. 

The supermarket giant preserves the original Marie Callender's concept to an extent — the frozen pies, both sweet and savory, certainly pay homage to the real Marie Callender's origin story, and the frozen food line still falls into the cozy comfort food category. Conagra has made changes over the years, of course. 2017 saw the supermarket giant emphasizing healthier choices for many of its brands, unveiling meal options with more veggies and lean protein for the Marie Callender's line.

However, in recent years, some longtime fans have claimed the quality of their favorite Marie Callender's frozen staples is on the decline — for example, online reviews of Marie Callender's chicken pot pie mentioned the pies were dry, that the gravy was watery and tasteless, and that the chicken had a rubbery texture. For an experience closer to what the woman herself was serving up back in the 1940s and '50s, visiting a Marie Callender's restaurant (where the dishes are cooked to order and inspired by recipes she created herself) may be the best way to go.

Like many brands, Marie Callender's has seen a handful of lawsuits over the years, but in the 1960s and '70s, the business made headlines when so-called "pie spies" attempted to steal company recipes. In the late '60s, Denny's Restaurants experimented with expansion in a few ways, one of which involved attempting a pie-themed offshoot via a merger with Marie Callender's. The Callender family declined the merger, but that didn't stop the sneaksters at Denny's. Allegedly, Denny's hired a former Marie Callender's employee who brought Callender's secret recipes to the diner giant. 

The Callender's team got wind of the mischief and quickly filed a lawsuit, including "allegations of espionage involving such things as dough mixes, egg glazes, pie crusts and oven temperatures and the alleged luring away of a trusted employee who knew the long-guarded secrets of pie making," as quoted by PBS SoCal. A similar case followed in 1977, when Callender's sought (and won) an injunction against another former employee who started a chain of pie stores in Oregon.

When a Georgia grandmother named Sharon Weiss popped her Marie Callender's pumpkin pie in the oven that fateful Thanksgiving Day in 2021, she was just looking for a quick, easy, and tasty dessert. However, after baking, Weiss was shocked to find the dessert had been scorched to oblivion, the top charred, black, and caving in on itself. Undoubtedly irritated, Weiss snapped a quick pic of the burnt pie and posted it with a message on Marie Callender's Facebook page — a message that would soon take the internet by storm: "Thanks Marie Calender for ruining thanksgiving dessert" [sic].

Sharon's Marie Callendar pie #BurnedAlongWithTheYuleLog pic.twitter.com/QnVdpJYzUp

— Marky Mark (@Doh_Is_Me) December 21, 2021

Within hours of Weiss' post, social media users were "marking themselves safe" from the pie-mergency, churning out memes like it was their job, and flooding the post with (mostly) humorous comments. Weiss later shared that while all that was going on, she learned there was actually an issue with her oven — the temperature had been changed from Fahrenheit to Celsius, so the pie was actually cooked at around 700 degrees Fahrenheit (uff-duh).

Thankfully, it was a simple fix, and a backup Marie Callender's pie turned out perfect. Weiss didn't learn about her viral moment until her daughter clued her in a few hours later, but instead of growing angry or embarrassed, she leaned into the moment. After calling Marie Callender's personally, she took down her post, but rolled with the jokes — even starring in a short video for the company's National Pie Day promotion. Talk about making the best of a sticky situation!