FOOD & DRINK

Pie-in-the-sky plan turns a profit

Machine makers thought they were nuts, but Berdoll Pecan Farm's 24-hour vending machine gets a slice of the market even when the store is closed

By Denise Gamino
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, November 23, 2008

Push-button pie is at your fingertips.

Just outside a large pecan orchard between Austin and Bastrop, a new pay-per-chew machine delivers whole pecan pies straight to your hungering hands.

Call them RoboPies.

The 24-hour outdoor vending machine stocks 3-pound pies filled with so many pecan pieces that it can be difficult to cut a smooth slice. Never has so much pecan filling been squeezed into a flaky 9-inch crust. There's hardly room for the syrupy filling.

And it's baked just down the road from where the nuts grew. This pie is as far removed from those bite-size pecan pies in convenience stores as a fresh yeast roll is from a stale cracker.

The automated pie-on-demand is brought to you by the Berdoll Pecan Farm store on Texas 71 about 17 miles east of Austin. The store is just two miles from the 15,000-tree pecan orchard the family owns along the Colorado River, where the trees thrive in the rich, alluvial soil and a commercial kitchen churns out pies and candy every day.

Drive up to the store (it's that place with the 100-foot red digital sign dominating the sky) and pull up to the vending machine perched on the boardwalklike front porch.

Five rows of bagged pecans and pecan candy peek out from the black machine. All appears ordinary until you glance at the left corner of the bottom shelf. You might do a double-take. You might blink a few extra times. You very well could laugh out loud.

It's almost impossible not to react to the pie in captivity just waiting for its $17.50 ransom to be paid with cash, coins or credit card.

And pay people do at all hours, even 1 or 3 in the morning, receipts show.

The Berdoll family installed the vending machine in June and has sold more than four dozen pies and so many bags of pecans and pecan candy that the vending machine has more than paid for itself.

But it wasn't all business that inspired the idea for 'round-the-clock pies. It was romance.

Jennifer Berdoll Wammack, daughter of store and orchard owners Hal and Lisa Berdoll, is the store manager. She lived with her parents on the pecan farm until marrying in March and moving to Austin with her husband.

Before her marriage, Jennifer often stayed late at the store to help customers who arrived after the official closing hour. She didn't like to turn anyone away. But a commute and a house of her own to keep up left no more free time to linger.

"Dad," she told her father, "it kills me there are cars driving up. They want our product and we're closed and we can't get it to them. I'm going to figure out a way. There's flat got to be a way."

Why not a vending machine, she wondered.

Jennifer and her father visited several vending machine dealers in Austin, but each one told the Berdolls that selling a full-sized, fresh-baked pie in a coin-operated machine just wouldn't work.

Then, in Buda, they found the Precision Vending company.

"You want to vend that pie?" a Precision worker asked.

"That's one of our best-sellers. We have to vend the pecan pie," Hal Berdoll said.

Precision Vending modified a refrigerated machine, giving the pecan pie a double-wide berth. The family added the words "Pecan Vending Machine Outside for After Hours" to their big electronic sign.

One customer left a yellow sticky note on the machine: "Way to go, Berdolls. Thanks for the 24-hour service."

At 10 on a recent night, traveling salesman Erick Robbins of Bastrop stopped at the vending machine.

"I was just passing through and thought, 'Heck I'll just stop in and see what they've got in that vending machine.' I didn't know what to expect. I was surprised. I said, 'Man, they put the whole pie in there.' "

Robbins bought the whole pie and a 1-pound bag of cinnamon and sugar pecans from the top shelf for $13.95. The pecan edibles were so good that he returned to the store a few days later to buy some sugar-free chocolate pecans for his grandmother.

"It's pretty convenient," Robbins said. "I'll probably be stopping in from time to time, I guess when I get a sweet tooth.

"They need to start putting their chocolate-covered strawberries in there and they'll be in business."

dgamino@statesman.com; 445-3675