From Apple To Pumpkin, It's No Pie-In-The-Sky Operation

Dan and Randi Johnson never set out to become bakers.

Dan was an engineer. Randi's degree was in elementary education.

But when the Woodinville couple bought an ailing pie store in 1984, they had to learn fast.

Today the Hi-Quality House of Pies Inc. turns out 3,000 fresh pies daily for restaurants and supermarkets around Western Washington. The bustling Woodinville bakery employs 48 people, including a fleet of truck drivers who rush the pies to supermarket shelves overnight.

The Johnsons say they simply learned to make a very good pie.

"There's an art to baking off a good pie," Randi said. "Not everyone can do it. You see some awful, dried-up things in grocery stores."

The Johnsons go to extremes to give their Flaherty's Pies a home-baked look. Cream toppings are hand-squeezed; fillings are made from scratch; dough is sheeted, rather than stamped into tins.

"Sheeting the dough gives you a flakier crust," Randi said.

Dan, the engineer, keeps the bakery's vintage equipment running.

"The machinery is old, but it's really stout," he said, shouting over the roar of a dough-kneading machine built along the lines of a Mack truck. "They don't make them like this anymore."

As pie tins rotate on a Lazy Susan, four Hi-Q employees perform a baker's ballet: inserting the bottom crust, filling the pie, applying the top crust, traying it for the oven.

"There are a lot of personal touches that have to be added," said Randi. "It keeps you hopping."

The bakery makes 23 varieties of pie, rotated monthly. Big sellers include Apple, Kahlua creme and "Bumbleberry," a mix of raspberry, blueberry, blackberry and boysenberry.

During the holiday season, the bakery's five big ovens have cranked out as many as 14,000 pumpkin pies in four days.

"The week after Christmas, I feel like everybody else; I couldn't look at another pumpkin pie," said Randi.

The Johnsons are high school sweethearts who grew up in Bellevue and went to Washington State University together. Dan worked as a sanitary engineer in Portland, then helped manage his father's airplane-engine rebuild business.

During the Boeing bust in the early '80s, Dan Johnson went looking for a manufacturing business "that didn't involve capital goods."

What he found was Hi-Q, then a pie shop on Northeast Eighth Street in Bellevue with a bakery in the back.

"The first few years were really hard work," recalled Randi. "We took our first vacation after seven years."

The couple began by supplying pies wholesale to restaurants, delis and nursing homes. In 1989, they built the bakery in Woodinville.

Three years ago, they took the plunge into the retail trade.

It was the right move at the right time. Many supermarkets were frustrated with the uneven quality of their in-store bakeries, and smaller groceries needed a larger selection.

The bakery now supplies about 150 stores, including QFC, Red Apple, Stock Market and many Albertsons and Safeways.

The Johnsons hope to expand soon into frozen pies. That will allow them to serve a wider area.

"We have the additional capacity, if we add an extra shift," said Dan. "As to the machines, we'll just have to grease the bearings faster."

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