How can a pie be healthy?

Pastry:

Derived from a post-war recipe when fat was scarce, our shortcrust pastry recipe includes hot water to help bind the ingredients. Using hot water as well as fat means that our pastry contains up to 40% less fat than our competitors. We’ve also removed all hydrogenated fats (the ones your body doesn’t need) from all of our products.

Fillings:

The way we cook our fillings is unique, which helps give our pies and puds their distinctive taste. Whereas many other pie makers make a sauce, then add cooked meat later, all of our fillings are made from scratch, using raw ingredients.

We slowly simmer our meat in its own juices, which allows the flavours, and a rich gravy, to develop naturally. This cooking process has allowed us to keep our use of stock and bouillons to an absolute minimum. We’ve even been able to remove the flavour enhancer MSG from our products, something which, as far as we are aware, no one else has been able to do! We use open-top pans for a lot of our cooking, which means we can skim excess liquid fat from the top of our fillings and then send this saturated fat for use as biofuel.

Basically, Holland’s pies and puds taste home-cooked because they are cooked just as you would at home; with care and attention and with natural, wholesome ingredients (although, obviously, our pans and ovens are a bit bigger, and we make over 1 million pies a week, rather than one or two…!).

Portion control:

We have resisted pressure to make our pies bigger at every stage. They don’t need to be king-sized, super-sized or XL – we think they’re the optimum size just the way they are. Portion control is the most basic way in which we can make a difference to the amount people eat, and by maintaining the current size of our pies indefinitely, we hope to make people realise they don’t always need that little bit more.

All of these measures mean that several of our core products have ‘amber’ status in the Food Standards Authority’s (FSA) guidelines on saturated fat per 100g. In addition, we are constantly striving to ensure our products meet FSA guidelines on sodium, with some falling even lower!

So, the next time you’re tempted by a Holland’s pie or pud, remember that the majority of our products have less fat and fewer calories than most other convenience or snack foods. As part of an active lifestyle and balanced diet, we can all enjoy a pie or pud now and again.

Unfortunately, we still wouldn't recommend eating six a day. Shame!