Jimmy's making most of its mince pies

Jimmy's Pies shop assistant Meghan Scanlan with a mince and cheese pie, and a stack of pies, sausage rolls and pasties, which will no longer be delivered outside Roxburgh. Photo / Stephen Jaquiery

Lovers of specialty Jimmy's Pies products will have to head to Roxburgh for some of their favourite treats, after the company streamlined its bulk sale items.

The company has stopped selling bacon and egg pies, mutton pies, potato top pies, sausage rolls and pasties except for at its Roxburgh bakery.

Only its two most popular products, mince pies and mince and cheese pies, will be available elsewhere.

"We've slimmed the line down, virtually going back to basics," owner Dennis Kirkpatrick said.

The move came after the Ministry for Primary Industries issued a product recall of specific batches of Jimmy's pies last month due to the presence of an undeclared ingredient, monosodium glutamate (MSG).

The company then found MSG had inadvertently been included in a supplied ingredient used in its product.

A supplier had reduced the salt in some ingredients and put MSG in as a replacement, but had not notified the company.

"MSG is one of these ones that you have to declare, even though it is not on the government list of allergens," Kirkpatrick said.

There were about seven ingredients used in Jimmy's pies, but the MSG incident had highlighted that within those ingredients, there could be another 15 individual items, he said.

As a result, the company's packaging, which was bought in quantities of five tonnes at a time, had to be changed to include a more detailed list of ingredients, including MSG.

The decision to streamline which products were distributed was made at the same time.

The five lines accounted for only a small amount of the business, and many customers had replaced orders of the discontinued lines with orders for the mince pies and mince and cheese pies, Kirkpatrick said.

"We actually haven't lost business, it's actually increased, because we are not making these extra pies."

Concentrating on the two most popular products also simplified labelling and packaging requirements, he said.

Following the MSG incident, Jimmy's had been researching the ingredients in bulk supplies, but found sometimes little information was available.

The company was considering if other products would be reintroduced at a later stage.