A pastry cook, a real estate agent, and one very stubborn rolling pin.

Matt started out as a pastry cook at fifteen. He left the industry, spent twelve-plus years selling houses around the Hunter, and one day decided he'd rather be elbow-deep in shortcrust than answering a phone about property inspections. He and Kylie opened Pie Hole in 2020.

It was, by most measures, a terrible time to open a shop. Lockdowns, supply chaos, the lot. But the pies were good, the locals showed up, and the line out the door started to be a regular thing.

A few years on, there are two shops — one on Wollombi Rd in Cessnock where it all started, and a second on Wine Country Drive in Nulkaba, catching the Hunter Valley traffic on its way to the vineyards. Everything still comes out of the oven on-site, still handmade, still never served in a foil tray.

Today the ovens are in new hands — ours. We've spent the last seventeen years running food businesses, mostly bakeries: pre-dawn starts, busy weekends, the same kind of customers who care about what they're biting into. We bought Pie Hole because Matt and Kylie built something genuinely good, and because we knew we could keep it that way.

Matt and Kylie haven't gone anywhere. They still own the buildings, they're close by, and they're backing this transition the way only the people who built the brand can — with advice, with their network, and with a shared interest in seeing Pie Hole grow.

They want the next chapter to honour the legacy they started, and so do we.

Same recipe book. Same pastry. Same Sweets and Cakes.