Pie Face Brand Guidelines: The 2003 Sydney Pie Chain Rebuilt by United Petroleum

Fast growth, two insolvencies and a buyer.

Pie Face began in Sydney in 2003. The Sydney Morning Herald, in a January 2017 report by Madeleine Heffernan, names its founders as Wayne Homschek and Betty Fong, and says the business went on to trade in Australia and the United States. English Wikipedia says the chain opened in New York City during 2012 and in New Zealand in late 2013. The Herald reported that outside investors had put money into the company from 2009 onwards, hoping for an eventual sharemarket listing.

That listing did not happen. In 2014 the company went into voluntary administration. SmartCompany, reporting in April 2017, said the chain had at one point run about 70 company-owned and franchised stores, and that it came out of administration in early 2015 with around 50. According to the Herald, a financier, TCA Global, took over the company’s loans, unsecured creditors agreed to a deed of company arrangement, and Pie Face shifted its focus to wholesale and direct retail sales.

The turnaround did not hold. In October 2016 TCA Global appointed the insolvency firm O’Brien Palmer as receiver, the second insolvency in two years. Before putting the business up for sale, the receivers appointed a new chief executive and finance chief, closed 11 company-owned stores and opened three franchised ones, and by January 2017 the chain was down to 30 franchised stores, the Herald reported. The business was then held in three parts: one company ran a commercial kitchen and a wholesale arm, a second owned the intellectual property, and a third ran the franchise network in Australia. The receivers told the paper that seven or eight companies were then carrying out due diligence on the business. English Wikipedia, which puts the chain’s peak at about 80 stores in Australia and the United States, says all the New Zealand outlets had closed by the end of 2017.

From high streets to service stations.

The buyer came from outside food retail. On 13 April 2017, SmartCompany reported that United Petroleum, a petrol-station operator with almost 400 outlets across Australia at the time, had bought the Pie Face intellectual property and retail network from the receivers for an undisclosed sum. The same report, citing Fairfax, said the deal did not include the central kitchen that had supplied the franchises; that kitchen stayed with the receivers. SmartCompany also reported that Pie Face’s chief executive would stay in his role under United’s ownership.

The change of owner moved the brand into a new kind of site. C&I Retailing, in a March 2018 report by Lucy Marrett, said United had begun rolling out Pie Face at the end of 2017, starting with four service stations at Deer Park, Altona, Croydon and Southport, and that the brand was in 21 United petrol sites by then, from Bathurst in New South Wales to Katherine in the Northern Territory and Kellerberrin in Western Australia. In that format, the trade title noted, the pies and pastries were baked fresh on site. English Wikipedia says Pie Face opened more than 200 locations between 2018 and 2020 and operated 240 as of December 2020.

Today the company’s own website describes a range built around pies, sausage rolls, toasties and barista coffee, with cookies and donuts alongside. Pie Face says its pies use a French-style flaky pastry and are baked fresh in store each day, and that some sites offer a drive-through for coffee. In 2026 the website says the brand has more than 300 stores across Australia; that is the company’s own figure.

Category context.

Australian and New Zealand food chains usually present themselves through a small set of repeated parts: a shopfront and sign that can be read from across a car park, a menu built around a few named products, and a story about the suburb where the first shop opened. Roast and charcoal chicken, burgers, pies, muffins, juice, pizza and patisserie each have their own version of that formula, but the structure is shared.

Many of these brands are franchised, and their own pages say so plainly. A typical corporate site explains that each restaurant or café is run by a local franchisee, lists stores by suburb and state, and keeps a separate page for prospective franchise partners. Store formats are named rather than described: drive-thru, shopping centre, strip store, express counter. Store counts appear in trade press with a date attached, and they move as shops open and close.

Ownership is often layered. Several chains sit inside larger groups or private equity portfolios, so one parent may hold more than one brand in the same category; Craveable Brands, for example, owns Red Rooster, Oporto and Chicken Treat. Founders tend to stay in the brand story long after a sale, and company pages keep the founding year, the first shop and the first signature product in view.

Expansion abroad is a recurring chapter, from New Zealand to Asia, the Middle East, Britain and the United States, and the record is uneven, with some markets opened and later left. For designers, these brands are useful studies in how a local takeaway turns its name, colours and a handful of signature items into a system that franchisees can repeat from one suburb to the next.

A small-format brand with two lives.

Pie Face’s story splits into two periods. From 2003 to 2016 it was a founder-led chain with its own kitchen, its own franchise network and offshore stores, financed by private investors and twice placed in the hands of insolvency practitioners. From 2017 it has been a food brand inside a fuel retailer, with the name carried onto service-station forecourts and counters rather than a stand-alone high-street estate.

The way the brand talks about itself has changed with it. In its first period, the Herald recalled in 2017, Pie Face described itself as having a “cult reputation” and a “cool” and “edgy” brand. The current website reflects the second period. Its pages are organised by plain category names (pies, sausage rolls, toasties, specialities, cookies and donuts, beverages), it returns again and again to baking in store, and its home page closes with the line “since 2003”, keeping the founding year in view under the new owner. C&I Retailing’s 2018 report showed the same pairing on the forecourt: a Pie Face counter inside a United service station, selling pies alongside coffee.

Names also need care. “Pie Face” is also the name of an unrelated party game, and this guide covers only the Australian food chain at pieface.com.au. Store counts change quickly in this kind of network, so any figure here carries the date and the source it comes from.

For a design guide, Pie Face shows how a small food brand can be carried into a larger owner’s sites while keeping its name and founding year in front of customers. Compare it with Muffin Break, another Australian counter-service bakery brand, and Michel’s Patisserie. For this guide we use a baked crust brown, a pastry cream and a golden glaze with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Pie Face’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.