Contributed by Cindy Arora
KANSAS CITY, MO — For many retail bakeries, holiday planning begins as summer winds down. Behind the scenes, bakers are creating menus, picking out packaging that will keep pies intact for shipping, brainstorming holiday cookie ideas, and working with vendors to secure specialty ingredients for the apex of the “most wonderful time of the year.”
’Tis the season to think ahead. After years of surviving and thriving through the holidays, a few bakery owners shared their best tips for prepping ahead of the winter rush.
Look local
Michele’s Pies, the award-winning pie shop in Norwalk, CT, starts planning for Thanksgiving … the day after the previous Thanksgiving. The year-long process starts with evaluating what went right and what needs tweaking to achieve the smoothest holiday experience.
The bakery is nationally known for its fresh pumpkin pie, made in its commercial kitchen, where 10,000 pounds of pumpkins are steamed, roasted and pureed on-site during the busiest time of the year.
“There’s nothing like fresh pumpkin,” said Stephen Jarrett, the bakery’s GM. “We’ve figured out that it is always best to look local. We work with area farms and during the holiday season, the cost is better and so is the relationship. One Thanksgiving season, we thought we were going to run out of apples, and one of our local farms loaded up their trucks and brought them to us.”
Focus on details early
For Janice Jucker, co-owner of the award-winning Three Brothers Bakery in Houston, the holiday season is a frenetic blur that starts in October and doesn’t let up until Mardi Gras in February. The bakery has made a name for itself with its DIY Gingerbread Houses and Pumpecapple Piecake — the Turducken of pie and cake — which features a three-layer cake with pumpkin, pecan and apple pies baked inside of it.
Janice and her staff start preparing for the Q4 holidays as early as they can, ordering pie tins, designing new packaging, branding boxes, planning new menus, and creating instruction inserts to send home with holiday desserts.
“These are things you don’t want to be dealing with in the middle of the holiday season,” Janice said. “You’re thinking of flour, sugar and eggs, but that’s the easy part. It’s all the custom details, marketing collateral, and the listing of ingredients on all the boxes that we’ve been working on all summer.”
For AMIE Bakery in Osterville, MA, summer on Cape Cod is peak tourist season. It’s also the time when holiday prep begins to take shape.
Owner and pastry chef Amie Smith, along with her team, tracks the data all year long, staying on top of what’s worked in previous years and what needs to be revised.
“We’ve got the holidays down to a science,” said Amie, who has been baking in the season for 12 years.
Menu planning begins right after Labor Day, and pre-production starts in October. Amie orders boxes for the popular Christmas Yule Logs as early as possible, and specialty ingredients such
as crystallized ginger, pecans, berries and chocolate are ordered in bulk months in advance to ensure the bakery is stocked for the holidays.
Plan for seasonal labor
For Amie, the toughest aspect of the holiday season is labor: finding (and keeping) staff at least through New Year’s Day.
“We have a team of about 35 people, most of them are part-time, high school kids, and
we get students from Johnson & Wales University,” Amie said. “There’s a cost to carry labor. We have to get them and train them, so we try to find good candidates who understand that production baking is different than home baking.”
A permanent staff and a roster of trained seasonal employees support new hires.
“We have a small but mighty core team, and the holidays are always manageable,” Amie said. “We are a scratch kitchen, and it’s all hands on deck, but we always get it done.”
For retail bakers, the months from October through December will always be hectic. Working ahead to lock in the holiday menu, hire seasonal help, and order ingredients and other supplies can minimize challenges and allow bakers to focus on optimizing sales and building brand awareness during their busiest selling season.
This story has been adapted from the September | Q3 2026 Craft to Crumb mini-mag. Read the digital issue here.
