Sutton Bridge pie and mash chef gets ready to supply meals abroad
A Sutton Bridge food magnate with a growing market for his take on a popular London meal is preparing to take his secret recipe overseas.
Nick Maguire (48) has seen his pie and mash business mushroom within 18 months “from a Facebook post, to a shop, to a mobile service”.
Demand has been so high for Nick’s varieties of a meal, which started out as a 19th century “sociable dish” for working class families in London’s East End, that he now has a 40-mile delivery area covering Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire and Norfolk.
But now the chance has arisen for Nick to help start a pie and mash franchise in southern Spain and he is also setting his sights on exporting Maguire’s Pie and Mash to the Canary Islands, west of Morocco, in the next two years.
Nick said: “The development of the business has been insane and since June 2019, we’ve sold between 15,000 and 16,000 pies within an area stretching west to Sleaford, south to Huntingdon, east to Ely and north to Hunstanton.
“In the middle of the first lockdown, we were dealing with 35 to 40 orders a day, with the average order being three lots of pie and mash which meant that we were doing up to 120 pies a day on a delivery basis.
“By the end of May, we were delivering more pies than I ever sold in the shop I had in Long Sutton.
“So I made the decision to leave the shop as I didn’t know how long the shop would be closed for and social distancing measures made takeaway queues risky in their own right."
A recent holiday in the Canary Islands gave Nick the meaty idea to expand his into continental Europe, while a call from an ex-customer of his opened the door to a potential new market of Britons now living in Spain.
Nick said: "One of my friends asked me to bring some pies over to the Canary Islands, but it ended up with 100 meals being served out there.
"So it dawned on me that I may have a semi-retirement opportunity over there and I've set my sights on taking pie and mash to the Canary Islands.
"I've also been asked to supply somebody in the Murcia region of Spain where tens of thousands of expats from Britain live.
"It's a former customer of mine who just rang me up and said that he'd moved to Spain where he'll be setting up his own business, putting pies and mash into English bars and restaurants.
"I know that pie and mash is a very sociable meal, but I never thought I'd be looking at international opportunities for the business.
"We've gone from a Facebook post, to a shop, to a mobile service and it's not really stopped."
