Owners of a beloved North East bakery say they have been “humbled” by an outpouring of community support after making the difficult decision to enter voluntary administration to tackle $1 million in pandemic-era debt.

Nedziak & Nedziak Pty Ltd, traders of Bright, Yackandandah, and Wodonga bakery Gum Tree Pies, were put into voluntary administration last Wednesday, 8 April.

Co-owner Melinda Nedziak said the company had about $1m in unpaid debt, which has been accumulating since the Covid pandemic, and received advice to enter administration to give themselves the best chance of survival.

“In our business we’ve got three or four really busy periods a year and I don’t think we’ve had a single Christmas period over the last few years without something impacting our tourism,” she said.

“It’s something that didn’t happen overnight; we just were really struggling to get on top of it.”

The popular pie shop employs more than 80 people across three locations in Bright, Yackandandah and Wodonga.

Ms Nedziak said since the pandemic, summer bushfires, floods and the Dezi Freeman manhunt have impacted tourism in the area.

Rising costs have also impacted the businesses’ financial capability, with bills for items like meat more than doubling in recent years.

Ms Nedziak said since it was announced the business had entered administration, they have had a number of other small businesses across the North East make contact and share their own struggles in the current financial climate.

“In this kind of business, you’re very visible, but you can also feel very alone,” she said.

“If anything else good can come out of this besides us surviving this, it’s that we have brought awareness to the fact how much businesses are struggling and how often people don’t realise.”

The business will remain open in the meantime across all three of their locations.

“We don’t want to shut, we love our business, we love our communities we are in,” Ms Nedziak said.

“We felt this was the only way we could survive.”

Ms Nedziak said the support they had also received from the wider community, and their customers had been “incredibly humbling” over the past week.

“We are so grateful for everyone who has come out and bought a pie or visited, we want to stay open for them, not just ourselves,” she said.

“We know our customers are doing it tough too, everyone is effected by interest rate rises, electricity and now fuel but it’s just a matter of doing what you can to survive.”

Ms Nedziak and husband Sebastian have been on the local business scene since 2007 when they opened a café.

When Sebastian was convinced to start making his own pies in 2010, they went gangbusters at markets across the state paving the way to open Gum Tree Pies in Yackandandah in 2016.

The bakery would open stores in Bright and then Wodonga from there.

A bakery was opened in Beechworth in 2019 but closed four years later.

Creditors will meet with administrators for an online meeting on 20 April.