Hubig's pie begins shipping namesake pastries to evacuees

Stacey Plaisance / Associated Press
For 85 years, New Orleans residents didn't have to look far for a fruit-filled, fried Hubig's pie.

The hand-sized pastry, wrapped in white paper emblazoned with the sketch of a plump man in a white apron and tall baker's hat, could be found at the counter of almost any grocery store or gas station -- even at the local hardware store and jail.

Hurricane Katrina changed that, when it brought the Simon Hubig Pie Co. to a halt and washed away its customer base. But the resilient culinary touchstone is slowly recovering and changing its business model along the way.

For the first time, Hubig's is making Internet sales to meet demand from displaced residents. Third-generation co-owner Andrew Ramsey said phone calls and e-mails for pies have come in steadily, from just about every state, since Katrina.

"We miss a lot about New Orleans, especially the Hubig's Pies ," one former Orleanian wrote in a recent online order from Chicago. Another writes: "My transplanted grandson yearns for Hubig's Pies. Do you ship to Las Vegas?" And another: "Does anyone carry your pies in Dallas?"

For four months after the August 2005 hurricane, Hubig's couldn't fry pies because of damage to the bakery and a lack of basic city services and workers. There was no shortage of tears as Ramsey recounted the company's struggles to reopen, one of the biggest being with the insurance company.

"Our neighborhood was either without water or the water was contaminated. There was water in the gas lines, and we certainly didn't have enough gas pressure to run the big boilers and big cookers that we use," Ramsey said. "But they just couldn't understand why we weren't making pies."

Hubig's used a $5,000 grant from a nonprofit entrepreneur group called the Idea Village to launch an online ordering service for T-shirts with the Hubig's logo. One of the stipulations of the grant was that the money go toward a new business concept or project.

"So while the company wasn't making pies, we sold T-shirts," Ramsey said.

In January 2006, when the insurance company finally settled and Hubig's started making pies again, Hubig's added pies to its online T-shirt orders. Drivers delivered pies to reopened stores and gas stations in New Orleans and to residents and workers living in tents in hard-hit coastal parishes.

Ramsey got emotional recalling parking a delivery van near a parade route and handing out hundreds of free pies to crowds gathered for the first post-Katrina Mardi Gras, last year.

"You have no idea," he said. "It was a good feeling, not just the feeling that people enjoyed the pies , but the feeling of, it's over, and we're going to be OK."

Today, the bakery produces as many turnovers as it did before Katrina -- sometimes more, depending on online orders, Ramsey said. The company is making roughly 100,000 pies a week, or 5 million a year, he said.

The bakery itself is right where its been for more than 80 years, tucked among shotgun homes and cottages just blocks from the French Quarter.

One recent day, a worker poured hot apple pie filling into buckets for cooling while another pinched dough between his fingers to check its consistency.

Dough was pushed through a machine, flattened into long, narrow strips. Sweet-smelling filling, lumpy with apple chunks, was squirted onto the dough in palm-sized doses as a machine folded the dough in half.

A large metal cutter -- one the bakery has used for at least 75 years -- rolled over the dough, cutting it into shape. The turnovers were dropped into a fryer, drained, and glazed with hot icing. They were cooled on rotating, circular racks with fans then dropped onto a conveyor belt, where a worker lined them up to be wrapped.
Hubig's hasn't resumed production of its 8- and 9-inch round pies . Ramsey said demand was declining before Katrina, and only about half the company's pre-Katrina work force of 60 is back.

Delivery routes also have changed: before the storm, the bakery delivered pies within about a 200 radius of New Orleans. Today, population shifts have caused changes in many routes. Some, including one to Gulfport, Miss., have been nixed altogether.

Depending on the destination, the cost of shipping is as much, or more, than the price of the pie. That's because shipping often must be expedited due to the short shelf-life of the pies, and the weight of the pies also affects the shipping cost, Ramsey said.

Pies retail for less than a dollar each, but a case of a dozen purchased online is $25. Shipping for that case, to such cities Baltimore and Chicago, runs about $18.18. It's about $22.38 to Boston and Denver, and $24.54 to San Francisco.

"It's embarrassingly pricey," Ramsey said. "But people want them."

The company buys many ingredients locally and makes its own filling. The best-selling flavors are apple and lemon. Other flavors include peach, pineapple, chocolate, banana and coconut.

Seasonal flavors include blueberry, blackberry and sweet potato.

Hubig's was started more than 100 years ago by baker Simon Hubig in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. New Orleans became a branch bakery for the southeastern U.S. chain, opening at its present location in the Faubourg Marigny in 1922. New Orleans was the only Hubig's to survive after the Depression, when the pies sold for just pennies.

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On the Net: Hubig's, http://www.hubigs.com