From tripe shop to football stadiums: How Carrs Pasties became a Bolton institution

Mention you’re going to the Carrs Pasties factory to anyone from Bolton, and you’ll get the same response that you’d get if you said you were off to see Willy Wonka at his chocolate factory.

Such is the deep affection towards these bundles of pastry joy.

Synonymous with family get-togethers from weddings to christenings, if you grew up in Bolton, you’ll have had a Carrs pasty at one time or another. And in all likelihood, loads of them.

“I’m a Bolton lad, and I used to walk past here on the way to school,” says Peter Worthington, who’s worked for the Carr family since the 80s, in all kinds of roles (‘a bit of everything’), from working in the bakery to health and safety. “I watched it being built. I never thought I’d end up working here.

“They’re just really nice people. I’m not just saying that, it’s a fact.” He even taught the young Carr brothers – Joe, Liam and Matt, who now run the business – how to use some of the bakery machines.

The business was started on Halliwell Road in Bolton in 1938, by the brothers’ grandmother Nellie, who sold her homemade pasties from the tripe shop she ran with her husband Joe. They soon found that people wanted less tripe and more pasties.

Queues would form daily, as mill workers would drop in for something to take to work, their classic meat and potato being the favoured fuel that powered the local cotton industry.

Their children Bernard, David, John and Veronica took it on from them in 1975, and built the factory that now makes thousands upon thousands of pasties a week on Manchester Road, the one Peter walked past on his way to school.

Brothers Joe, Liam and Matt – John’s three sons – took on the business in 2013 with some big plans in place, including a brand new, glass-fronted shop next door to the factory, and pasties being sold at Anfield and, of course, Bolton Wanderers, where the North Stand has been called the Carrs Pasties Family Stand since 2017. Most importantly, they scaled up their output significantly.

Joe, the youngest, is the MD. “I’ve lived and breathed pasties my whole life,” he says. Since the three brothers took the reins, they’ve ramped up production to a staggering four million pastry products a year.

“My dad, he always used to just say ‘I come in, I make pasties, I sell ‘em, I go home’,” adds Joe. “All he cared about was the quality of the product and customer service. He didn’t know what brand meant, no market research, anything. He invested in a couple of bits of equipment, to make sure the pasties kept coming, but he built that reputation by keeping it simple.”

It’s still pretty simple. There are now curried pasties, and the steak pasty was only added to the core range in 2015. There’s another with cheese, and a fairly recent addition with cheese and jalapenos, but other than that, people buy Carrs because they know – and love – exactly what they’re going to get; thin, crisp pastry, unlike your thicker, Cornish style, and generous, well-seasoned fillings.

Crowing about hyper-local produce is now a standard feature on many a swanky restaurant menu. Carrs have always done it. Potatoes come from Bolton-based Ward’s, cheese from Proctor’s near Preston, flour from Nelstrops in Stockport and meat from Bowland’s in Ribbleton.

So keeping it simple has been, well, a doddle really, though that’s not to say things have remained the same. Now you can buy Carrs all across the UK, thanks to a nationwide delivery service. Pasties are filled hot and blast frozen before baking in the factory, and then shipped out to be baked in ovens in shops all over the north west and well beyond.

There are now four shops in Bolton alone, including the shining flagship next to the factory, where you can pick up everything from a classic meat and potato to a pasty barm, a combination supposedly devised by schoolboys in the 1950s as a ‘cheap dinner’ and reportedly a favourite of boxer and Boltonian Amir Khan.

There are also over 100 trade partners across the north west and the UK, who bake and sell Carrs Pasties products on their premises.

“We’ve built the brand around what was already great,” Joe says. “We’re the luckiest lads in the world.”