A bread salesman, a sold sports car and a kitchen in Earl Shilton.

Pukka began in 1963 in a family kitchen in Earl Shilton, a Leicestershire town near Hinckley. Its founder, Trevor Storer, came from a baking family: according to his obituary in The Daily Telegraph in August 2013, as summarised by English Wikipedia, he joined the bakery his grandfather had founded in 1899 after leaving school at sixteen, spent his National Service as an instructor at the British Army’s bakery school, and stayed on as a trainee manager when the family business was sold to Allied Bakeries in 1960. He wrote a book called Bread Salesmanship, which Allied used as a training manual.

In 1963 he left Allied and, the Telegraph said, sold his Austin-Healey Sprite to pay for a business of his own. It was called Trevor Storer’s Home Made Pies, because the pies were made in the Storers’ home in Earl Shilton, the Hinckley Times reported. In the first week he sold 1,200 steak and kidney pies, mostly to pubs, and chicken and mushroom pies soon joined the range; the Hinckley Times put first-year turnover at £12,000. His wife, Valerie Storer, was part of the business from the start. The trade magazine Bake & Take wrote in 2005 that while Trevor made pies to be sold the next day, Valerie answered the phone and devised new recipes, and The Grocer in 2024 named the couple together as the people who started the business.

The name came a year later. In 1964 the business became Pukka Pies, at Valerie Storer’s suggestion. She later explained, the Telegraph reported, that “pukka” was a fashionable word at the time and stood for something top-notch. The company grew from that home kitchen to a bakery at Syston, near Leicester, which is still its home today. The company now trades simply as Pukka, and it marked its 60th birthday in May 2023.

Pubs, chip shops, football grounds and, later, supermarkets.

For most of its history Pukka was a pie you bought hot, away from home. English Wikipedia lists chip shops, stadiums, butchers, cafés and pubs as its most common outlets, and names Millmoor, then the home of Rotherham United, as the first sporting venue to sell the pies. The football link became part of the brand. The main stand at Oldham Athletic’s Boundary Park has carried the Pukka Pies name, and so has the main stand at Rotherham’s New York Stadium; the company also sponsored the England Band, the supporters’ brass band that follows the national side, BBC Leicester reported in 2006. At the end of 2025 Reading FC announced a multi-year deal to sell Pukka at its ground, the Reading Chronicle reported.

The range has stayed close to the original. In 2005 managing director Tim Storer told Bake & Take that the steak and kidney and all-steak pies used chunks of steak and that the recipes had never changed. The same article described chickens being cooked on site and the factory making 180,000 pies and pasties a day. A company sales breakdown reported by the Independent on Sunday in 2005 put steak pies at more than half of Pukka’s sales, ahead of chicken and mushroom and minced beef and onion.

Supermarkets came later. English Wikipedia dates the start of supermarket sales, of pies to heat at home, to 2008. Sport stayed the main stage for the name: in 2009 Pukka sponsored the UK Snooker Championship, and the winner, Ding Junhui, was awarded his body weight in pies — 276 of them — which he gave to a homelessness charity in Sheffield, BBC Sport reported. A vegetarian Cheese, Leek & Potato pie won The Grocer’s Best New Product award in September 2019, the company says, and vegan recipes and a “Just for Two” sharing range followed.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make frozen food, pies or pasties sold in Britain: Birds Eye, McCain, Aunt Bessie’s, Young’s, Chicago Town, Ginsters and Pukka. Brands in this part of the British food trade sit at many different points in it, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a football ground or a petrol-station counter to a supermarket freezer.

A frozen or savoury food brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the meal it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factory or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its food is actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its food is made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family business, an orange pack and a rainbow of recipes.

Pukka is still owned by the family that started it. Trevor Storer retired in 1995, at 65, and remained chairman, while his sons Tim and Andrew Storer took over the day-to-day running of the business as joint managing directors, the Telegraph reported. He died in July 2013, aged 83, BBC News reported. In March 2024 the company was reported to be looking at new investment as part of a strategic review; that May it promoted its managing director, Isaac Fisher, who had joined in 2013 after working at Samworth Brothers, to chief executive, under what The Grocer described as continued family ownership. Tim and Andrew Storer remain directors, and Fisher’s predecessor, Deborah Ewan, became a non-executive director, Just Food reported. Turnover reached £79.1 million in the year to May 2023, up from £64.5 million.

Its pies are made in Syston, where the company announced a £4.5 million investment in its bakery in March 2021, Food Manufacture reported, after a year in which it had launched its first plant-based pie and its biggest marketing campaign, “The People’s Pie”. Pukka won The Grocer’s Brand of the Year award in November 2020; the company says the judges recognised its repositioning and rebrand. The Walker Agency, which describes itself as Pukka’s strategic and creative lead agency, says its work was built around a “Pukka for the People” strategy.

The pack has been the visible part of that change. In 2020 Pukka moved to an all-orange pack, which the company says was fully recyclable and dropped the plastic window. In August 2026 it began replacing it with recipe colours that echo the coloured foils its pies come in: black for All Steak, red for Minced Beef & Onion and green for Cheese, Leek & Potato, each with a large pie photograph and an orange logo. “Our iconic logo is now bigger and bolder than ever,” Fisher told Talking Retail.

For a design guide, Pukka shows how a family pie maker can carry one fashionable 1960s word from pub counters and football terraces to the supermarket shelf. Compare Ginsters, the Cornish pasty maker, and Tunnock’s, another family-run British bakery. For this guide we use Pukka orange, steak black and beef red with a heavy sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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