The Grueling Way Marie Callender's Had To Deliver Its Iconic Pies In The '40s

Even the greatest businesses had to start somewhere. Walt Disney started animating in his uncle's garage before creating a media empire. Amazon was built out of the garage of a rented house, and Microsoft was the brainchild of two childhood friends who made it work in a garage. (A lot of these stories involve garages, for some reason.) Marie Callender is no exception. Before it was a restaurant chain and a successful line of frozen foods, it was a humble baking enterprise that required the founder's son to deliver the goods on a bicycle.

Marie Callender, like Chef Boyardee and Colonel Sanders, was a real person. Beginning in the 1930s and continuing into the 1940s, she began to bake pies out of her kitchen in Long Beach, California, selling them to local restaurants and whoever else might want them. But those pies aren't just going to magically appear in their kitchens, and during the Great Depression (and World War II, when rationing hit gasoline as well as bread slicers), it made sense to drive sparingly. So Marie's son, Don Callender, would pedal his way across Long Beach and deliver pies to customers. We're sure it wasn't exactly easy work, but it set the table for future success — and probably gave him some solid cardio.

In 1948, Don Callender wouldn't have been able to use the car to deliver pies even if he wanted to. That was when the Callenders sold the family car in order to get the money to start a true wholesale baking business. (They got $700 for the car, a considerable sum back in the day.) It was a gamble, like any business, but it's hard to say it didn't pay off.

Eventually, Don was able to open sit-down restaurants, where he first attracted customers in the 1960s by putting the pie oven in the display window so passersby could see them bake. The menu gradually expanded, and the restaurant became a successful chain; perhaps not as successful as the Olive Gardens of the world, but successful nonetheless. Today, of course, Marie Callender's is best known for its frozen food line owned by Conagra (which also owns Banquet, one of its competitors); there are now just 23 brick-and-mortar Marie Callender's locations, almost all in California. Still, it's not bad for a company that started life being delivered by a teenager on a bike.