"The lard is what makes [her pie crusts] flaky, and that's why people keep coming out," "Mama Jo" Johanna Mann said. "Instead of just eating the filling of a pie, you can actually eat our crust, it's that good."
AMHERST, Ohio - About a year ago, Johanna "Mama Jo" Mann sat down with her two children and asked them if they wanted to take over the family business, Mama Jo Homestyle Pies, or sell it to someone else.
"You two have got to figure out if you want the business or not," she said. Her husband and lead baker, Jeff Mann, had retired in 2014, "I turn 60 in a few years, and I'm retiring. I already bought an RV, and I want to tour the United States."
So her son, General Manager Ken Dumke Jr. started coming in before sunrise to learn the daily rhythm of the business. Dumke, 33, had pursued a career as a small engines mechanic before his love of pie brought him back home in 2001.
His sister, Jenna Rabosyuk, 25, recently left her job as assistant communication director and speechwriter for Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor in Columbus to take over the retail end, from helping customers choose among the 34 fruit and cream pies to taking orders from local retailers.
Dumke typically gets to work around 4:30 a.m. to fire up the ovens and start mixing the flour, sugar, eggs and lard -- 700 pounds at a time -- for the from-scratch, made-daily pie crusts. "The lard is what makes it flaky, and that's why people keep coming out," said Mann, 56. "Instead of just eating the filling of a pie, you can actually eat our crust, it's that good."
Except for the machine that punches the slabs of pie dough into the tins and crimps on the top crust, everything else is done by hand. The family used to have a machine that filled the pies assembly-line-style, but it was such a hassle to clean it between flavors and keep in good repair that they went back to doing it the old-fashioned way.
At one table, a woman ladles still-steaming chocolate pudding into cooled pie shells, before turning the tray around to fill the shells on the other side.
At another station, women are piping orange and brown stripes onto football-shaped sugar cookies, and dotting the eyes on frosted ghosts and bats. Their order for Cedar Point amusement park that day: 140 dozen. "She rolls them out with a rolling pin and cuts them out all by hand," Mann marvels.
When the cream pies cool, Emily Dammeyer and Brenda Owens scoop up handfuls of the just-whipped cream and carefully drop and shape the dollops on top of each pie. They sprinkle them with chocolate cookie crumbs, banana chips or peanut butter cups, depending the type of pie.
"Putting whipped cream on by hand is faster and less messy" than using a machine to squirt it onto the tops of the the desserts, Mann said. She jokes that when her staff is hungry, they tend to be more generous with the amounts they slather on the pies.
The day's orders can range from an average of 500 pies in three sizes to more than 28,000 pies in the week leading up to Thanksgiving. Three industrial-sized rotary ovens can churn out 1,000 small pies, 648 mediums and 432 large fruit pies every hour to 70 minutes during peak pie season. Pie shells for cream pies take about 10 minutes.
And that's not counting the strudels, cheesecakes, specialty pies, muffins, and hand-rolled and decorated sugar cookies. "It's almost like a marathon," Mann says of holiday pie season.
"All of our fruit is individually flash frozen, so it keeps its shape even after it's baked," Rabosyuk said. "We buy 1,800 pounds a month -- and that's just apple," her mother added.
Johanna Mann's mother ran a catering business with her sisters in Amherst, and her elder brother, Peter, ran the bakery using his mother's recipes.
The demand for their pies and other baked goods quickly overshadowed the catering end of business, so Johanna and Peter took it over. Johanna, who had been selling hospital equipment for Invacare in Elyria, decided that "corporate America just wasn't fun anymore."
She's the one who expanded it beyond a single store to sell to restaurants and larger retailers who order by the thousands. "With my sales and marketing background, it was either go big or go home," Mann said. "We went from zero to $1 million in one year, and it freaked him out a little bit."
Peter left the business in 1995 to move to Columbus, and Johanna's husband became the lead baker after Peter left.
Inspired by their other family business, Papa Joe's Pizza in Vermilion, they named the business "Mama Jo's" after Johanna, who at that point was a mom of two.
The coconut, chocolate cream, peanut butter and lemon meringue pies baked that morning will be on the shelves of Heinen's Fine Foods or Discount Drug Mart tomorrow. They also bake for the concession stands and employees' commissary at Cedar Point, and for catered special events. They recently baked hundreds of three-bite mini pies for a wedding reception.
Because they make all their pies from scratch every morning and don't use any preservatives, their shelf life is three days, four days tops. That's how their customers seem to prefer it, and there are seldom leftovers to take home. If a top crust cracks during baking, that pie will be cut and sold by the slice.
Longtime customers who stop by on the way to the bank or the grocery store know better than to expect their favorite flavor to be in the cooler when they come back, Mann said.
Their flavors range from the traditional pumpkin, apple crumb and French silk to specialty flavors such as Mississippi Mud, chocolate-and-peanut-butter Buckeyes, Caramel Apple Walnut, Banana Split, Key Lime, and Peach Blast.
While the filling in other stores' fruit pies runs into the bottom of the pan when you cut it, her pies stay high and intact, she says, with more apple slices than sugary slurry.
Apple and chocolate cream pie are the most popular flavors year-round. In summer, around the fourth of July, it's strawberry cream cheese. They make their pumpkin pie all year long, but orders start to spike in early September and run through January.
Demand always declines for the first few weeks of the year, "because everybody thinks they're on a diet," Mann said, shaking her head. "I give them four to six weeks, then they'll be back."
Homemade pies are a comfort food that people crave around the holidays and at family get-togethers, or even during times of trouble, Dumke said. "After 9/11, we got slammed. Business jumped 35 percent. Everybody just wanted to stay at home eating pie."
"Nothing says 'home' more than pie," his sister agreed.
Even though her mother asked if they wanted to take over the business, Rabosyuk said she and her brother never considered selling it to anybody else. "It's just part of the family deal," she said. When she and her then-boyfriend, now-husband got serious, her mother told him: "This is what you're marrying into. This is our family."
"We're baking 24/7 to make sure every other family has pies for Christmas and Thanksgiving," Rabosyuk said. That's just as much a tradition for her family as their pies and sweets are for their customers' families.
Her mother overheard her and added: "If you're going to eat pie, you might as well eat a Mama Jo's pie."