The future of the service station pie is safe, as Kiwis chomp through ever greater quantities of increasingly diverse and gourmet pies.

July was Z's Pie Month, which saw just shy of half a million pies consumed across the network and four new flavours trialled.

Z's Italian Meatball pie.

'What pie month showed us is that a good quality pie remains a core part of our cultural fabric, but we're becoming increasingly adventurous around what we expect in our pies,” says Z's retail general manager Mark Forsyth.

'This year we trialled four new flavours, including Italian Meatball, Seafood Chowder, Bangers and Mash and Vegetable Korma, all baked by Phil and the team at Goodtime Pies in Hawke's Bay.

'While Italian Meatball was the clear favourite we saw really strong sales across all pies across all of the network with really high customer engagement.”

Mark says Z's DIY Pie competition, which also ran over July, attracted more than 3000 entries with people submitting their own pie recipes across the ‘meat', ‘meat-free' and ‘sweet categories.

The winning pies in each category were venison and cranberry (meat), roast vegetable (meat-free) and ‘Guilt free' banoffi pie (sweet).

The next step will selecting one of these pies to be baked by Phil and the Goodtime team and sold in the Z Espress network for the month of November.

'Last year's DIY Pie competition was a great example of listening to our customers in that Gemma's Mexican Vegan Pie was the standout winner, which proved so popular it has been introduced as a permanent item in Z's range and continues to be one of our best sellers,” says Mark.

'Pie month is a hugely popular part of the Z promotional calendar. Our customers love the opportunity not only to try a wide range of new pies but to tell us what they want to see in our pie line-up.

'We always get great customer feedback and inevitably learn a lot. We also get to see first-hand how important the pie remains as a part of Kiwis' cultural DNA.”