In the world of handheld snack pies, there are the casual dabblers and the true believers. Count JTM Foods, the largest maker of handheld pies in the world producing more than 350 million pies annually, in the latter category. 

“We’re pie evangelists,” said Monty Pooley, JTM president and chief executive officer. “We’re expanding our portfolio, but at the end of the day, we are all about handheld snack pies.”

JTM Foods has tripled its production since Pooley joined the Erie, Pa., company in 2017. The team realized the need to expand production a few years ago.

“At the time, our plant was running 24/6 nonstop,” said Joe Amboyer, senior vice president of operations. “We were actually running some seven-day challenges, and we paid double time or whatever we needed to keep going.”

 The company started looking at options for another facility, one that was closer to the western and southern parts of the United States to improve logistics. After checking out 10 sites in six states, the company chose Wichita, Kan., in the spring of 2022 and didn’t waste any time getting started.

“We were actually purchasing equipment before we knew where home was going to be because of the timeline,” Amboyer explained while sitting in the new 195,000-square-foot facility. “We broke ground in August 2022 here and in September of 2023, we were producing. Thirteen months of turnaround after COVID issues with manufacturing supplies and timelines, it was a huge team effort across the board.”

Founded in 1986, JTM Foods started making crispy rice treats in 1993 and putting their 4-oz pies in a box in 1999, which helped differentiate the company through better merchandising and product protection. When Pooley joined the company, he brought a new focus to JTM.  

“Monty came on board and gave us a clear direction, and he made some decisions on the products that we should work on and the products we shouldn’t,” Amboyer added. “That was a huge turning point for us to get the right direction on what we wanted to be.”

When it became clear that JTM was maxing out its handheld pie capacity, Pooley said it limited the team’s ability to talk to customers about growth opportunities.

 “I can’t have a meaningful, genuine conversation with a large customer who wants to take advantage of a category if I don’t have the capacity to handle it,” he explained. “We needed the capacity for existing demand, but more importantly, we needed that capacity so that when we sit with customers, we can be authentic and genuine and say we can support the type of growth you could potentially deliver from the category. Without this we would very much be boxed in with our existing customers.”

JTM went into the planning process for Wichita wanting at least as much space as it has in Erie, which is an 80,000-square-foot manufacturing plant housing six production lines and a 60,000-square-foot warehouse the company rents. But JTM wanted to keep it all under one roof to avoid moving materials and finished goods between two facilities as it must in Erie. The company worked closely with Cornejo & Sons Inc., the developer that built the Wichita plant.

“We had several of us in conference rooms constantly drawing, putting designs together,” Amboyer said. “We actually took the building team here in Wichita and flew them out to Erie to help them understand the difference between building a warehouse and a food manufacturing facility, the different clean things we have to have, the codes for the drains.”

JTM initially looked for an existing facility, suspecting that would be easier to meet the aggressive timeline leaders set forth. 

But the developers that the company found and the various government entities that lent a hand made a new facility in Wichita an attractive choice.

“We came to Wichita, and the public-private partnership and cohesiveness and organization with which the folks in Wichita presented us were very impressive, and I think we felt like we were wanted in Wichita,” said Kyle Hinsdale, JTM executive vice president and chief financial officer.

He said government and business leaders became involved because they were looking to diversify the city’s economic base, which has traditionally been dependent on the aviation industry.

“We had involvement of the lieutenant governor at the state office, we had county commissioners, we had all local representatives and the mayor of Wichita was heavily involved,” Hinsdale said. “There are business leaders who have developed a greater Wichita partnership which was instrumental in getting us to Wichita. A lot of private, state, local, county as well as business leaders in the Wichita area.”

Pooley pointed out that Tenex Capital Management, which bought a majority share of JTM in 2021, provided valuable resources as well.

“Tenex, our private equity ownership, provided us resources that helped us to find the facility, work with those government agencies that Kyle is referencing and actually had a role in helping to build out the facility as well,” he said. “Those were important resources for us that allowed us to do it within the timeframe.”

This article is an excerpt from the June 2024 issue of Baking & Snack. To read the entire feature on JTM Foods, click here.