KANSAS CITY, MO — Falling leaves, cooler temperatures and shorter days mark more than just the start of autumn. For bakers, this time of year marks prime pie production season as customer demand rises leading up to the Thanksgiving holiday.
Pie by the Numbers
Michele’s Pies — a gourmet pie shop in Norwalk, CT, with 51 American Pie Council awards to its name — is keen on what this time of year requires from a production, ingredient and labor perspective.
Stephen Jarrett, manager of Michele’s, shared that while the bakery produces a steady cadence of pies on a weekly basis, holidays increase volume by double or triple.
“We’re really holiday-driven, meaning that our fourth quarter is huge,” he said. “Thanksgiving is our biggest holiday. I suspect it’ll be more this year, but we do at least 25 percent of our business in the month of November, which is crazy and always astonishes me.”
During this part of the year, Michele’s rolls out hundreds to thousands of pies a week through a mix of its storefront and nationwide shipping via Goldbelly, a food e-commerce platform.
Over on the West Coast, I Like Pie Bakeshop in Pasadena, CA, averages about 4,000-4,500 pies per week across its three locations. During peak production, those figures easily double to 8,500-9,500 pies a week, ranging from minis to 10-inch products.
“At the retail walk-in level, it’s about 30 percent higher, and then online it’s a good 40 percent higher,” said Annika Corbin, founder and CEO of I Like Pie. “Everybody’s pre-ordering so then about 30 percent of our overall sales come from people pre-ordering around the holidays.”
She estimates that her bakery produces about 40,000 pies in November as compared to 20,000 during a standard month. To keep track of where production might take I Like Pie nearing Thanksgiving Day, the bakery holds regular meetings to outline goals.
“We have weekly production meetings to measure against our goals and share a countdown to Thanksgiving with the entire team,” Annika said. “This helps avoid unnecessary spikes in labor and material purchases because we are mapping both out at a steady pace.”
Essential Ingredient Prep
At Michele’s, working with local vendors has helped the Connecticut bakery be able to uphold its high standard for quality. With everything from crusts to pumpkin puree being produced in-house, keeping production moving requires a dedicated system and essential relationships with vendors. The interpersonal relationship with local ingredient suppliers also helps the bakery when it’s in a pinch.
“If you’re running late with a corporate supplier, if your order time is 3:30, you can’t get your order in at 3:31, the order system is cut off,” Stephen said. “With a local farm that we buy apples from, I’m almost certain that if I called them up and asked, ‘Can I get some apples today?’ they’d be like, ‘Sure, what time do you want to come?’”
The bakery prepares as much as possible, pressing and freezing pie crusts ahead of time and prepping essential ingredients such as crumb toppings by the gallon.
When production peaks, every square foot of space in Michele’s is filled to keep things moving. Located in an industrial condo, the pie shop leans on its neighbors to borrow additional space during this time of year. The bakery also built a walk-in freezer and connected it to the shop to house its Goldbelly orders, which can account for nearly 15% of sales.
Before the I Like Pie Bakespace opened a couple of years ago — the pie shop’s 4,400-square-foot commissary in Upland, CA — balancing production out of the small kitchens in its brick-and-mortar locations was no small feat.
“The scramble when we were working out of a single store was very, very intense,” Annika recalled. “Not only did we not have the space for everything from cold storage to dry storage, we also had to cram everybody into a small space for a few weeks and work around the clock to get everything done. It was really intense and not conducive to what I would consider a productive work environment.”
The commissary has been a game-changer for the pie shop, especially when it gets extra busy at the close of the year. Annika and her team are now able to stockpile ingredients that can be made ahead of time, such as pie shells, to make rolling out thousands pies that much easier.
“It’s a smaller and smaller percentage of the work, and for us, that has made all the difference in the world,” she shared. “What we’re able to do now is stockpile the things that can be made ahead so that we can then focus our staff.”
A Team Effort
Staffing is essential to success during major baking occasions, and Michele’s and I Like Pie each take their own approach to keeping product moving.
Stephen shared that Michele’s becomes an all-hands-on-deck operation, roping in family and friends to help box pies, run the order tent in the parking lot and bring orders out to customers. To assure the bakery’s standards stick, the team often implements a buddy system of sorts.
“One of our full-time staff members or someone who’s here all the time and knows what’s going on partners up with someone new,” Stephen explained. “They will work on a project together so that one person can supervise and make sure that there aren’t mistakes.”
The Michele’s team will oftentimes also offer repetitive tasks that don’t require special skills such as scooping seeds from a pumpkin.
By cross-training front-of-house employees to assist with basic kitchen tasks, I Like Pie is able to concentrate on its current staff rather than training seasonal hires.
“Training takes a lot of time, so we try to invest it in a way that lasts beyond the holidays and teaches new skill sets to our existing team members,” Annika shared.
This approach paired with the prep work of ingredients and essentials done in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving lets the focus stay on placing pies in ovens and getting them in the hands of customers much quicker.
“It’s a luxury that not a lot of smaller bakeries have, and we didn’t used to,” Annika said. “I think I appreciate it all the more because we’ve done it both ways.”
The preparation process has been a major learning curve for both brands, and one that’s taken years to master. But at its core, handling eras of high sales lies in laying out and sticking to processes.
“I doubt there have been many bakers who walk in and just decide on what to do that day,” Annika said, noting that I Like Pie continues to dial in its process 13 years in. “There has to be a plan. The stronger the plan and the more it’s threaded through your entire operation, the better the execution.”
For a deeper dive into the day-to-day of a pie shop, check out the September | Q3 2023 mini-mag featuring Peggy Jean’s Pies.
