Megan Navarro
HAYS COUNTY — Just as people are gearing up for the hustle and bustle of the holiday season with decorating their homes, keeping traditions alive and finding the perfect gift for someone, bakeries big and small are also getting ready to serve an influx of customers
One of those being Tootie Pie Co. The shop — originally known as Tootie’s Pie Shop — started in 1985 when Ruby “Tootie” Feagan was baking and selling pies from her home in Medina, before opening a storefront in the small Texas town. She quickly refined her recipes and became known for her six-pound original apple pies, selling those by the hundreds and winning blue ribbons at county fairs.
When she wanted to expand, Feagan secured investors and they built a larger bakery in Boerne, right outside of San Antonio. While she retired several years ago, the original Tootie’s, now 95, her legacy lives on.
Ten years ago, now-CEO Brian Gile started investing and, eventually, bought the company. When he was looking for an even bigger space in Boerne to expand, he was out of luck. He ended up finding Dripping Springs to be the best location for a second store and bakery to open in 2019.
“I was living in Dallas at the time and they had a store up there near my house. I started going in there, really liked it and I called down to Boerne and started investing,” he said. “It was a nice progression. I really enjoyed the industry.”
The path to investing also started when Gile talked to Scott Calvert — who owned The Cake Plate in Austin — at a trade show, who was also looking for a bigger bakery. They combined the companies to build the Tootie Pie facility off US 290 in Dripping Springs, allowing them to do more than just pie, but also cakes, cookies, brownies and more, for wholesale and retail.
“He was a very well-known, well-respected wedding cake [baker] and he did that until he retired before the pandemic,” Gile said. “We didn’t start that business up again after the pandemic, but he’s still involved in the business on the wholesale side.”
While Tootie Pie opened its Dripping Springs location in 2019, a year later, it was shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, due to it being considered an essential business because it produced food not only for the bakery, but also for restaurants, golf clubs, etc., Gile explained, it was allowed to reopen in mid-2020.
“We didn’t have to lay anybody off, which was fortunate,” he shared. “It was touch-and-go for a year, but we had a lot of great customers and a great crew.”
There are a variety of items for customers to choose from when they are either going in-store or buying online — an option where shipping all over the U.S. is available. This includes several pie flavors, including apple crumb, buttermilk chess, cherry, chicken pot, chocolate pecan, coconut supreme, heavenly chocolate, huge apple, key lime, pecan, pumpkin, sweet potato crumb, triple berry and whiskey pecan.
“We developed some new recipes for flavors that Tootie didn't have, like our whiskey pecan. We created that a few years ago and it's now become our third top seller. But all the originals, the huge apple, the pumpkin, the pecan, heavenly chocolate [and] buttermilk, those are all Tootie recipes, including the crust, which we're pretty proud of,” the CEO stated. “That's kind of what we built our business on was the crust and we've never changed the recipe because she got famous for that.”
Additionally, because “we know that not everybody wants pie,” Gile said, there are other options, like cutie cakes, or individually sized cakes, emPIEnadas, cakes, cheesecakes and cookies. There is also a gluten-free line and, in January, Gile said that they will be launching a no-sugar added line of pies.
On the wholesale side, they produce more than 100,000 products for various companies. How they do this, Gile said, is by selling the items to big distributors, like Sysco or BDK, who then sell them to restaurants, cafeterias and businesses.
Leading up to the holiday season is a multi-month process, as they start baking several hundred pies per day in October, Gile said, knowing that Thanksgiving is a busier holiday for them compared to Christmas.
“At Christmas, we are still shipping a lot of business gifts and there are a lot of people that buy pies and cakes for Christmas gatherings. But, it’s more spread out. So, we go into really heavy shipping in the first part of November,” he explained. “We’ll ship several thousand pies a day through the rest of the year. It’s pretty intense. It's a lot of fun, but it's a lot of work. We have a really good team that's been doing this for several years. We are baking and shipping almost the same day.”
It’s all-hands-on-deck during the busy season, with two to three people in the bakery up front helping customers, answering phone calls and emails. Then, there are about eight or nine people in shipping, who are fulfilling orders, and 10-15 people baking.
“It's a big undertaking, but the team is very, very good at keeping everything moving along. We'll drive a UPS truck up the night before and they just drop the trailer and we fill that up,” Gile said. “They bring another one, we fill that up. It's just kind of a constant baking, packing [and] shipping kind of cycle for several weeks.”
On the website, the cut-off time for ordering is typically midnight before for the next day to either ship or pick-up in the store. However, Tootie Pie only ships Monday through Wednesday because it’s shipping refrigerated and they want to ensure that the customer will get the best, fresh product.
“We always encourage people to order early, so that we can make sure they get their flavor they want because we do sell out of some of the more popular things and then, also to make sure they give themselves time to ship because UPS is shipping millions of shipments out those weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas,” Gile emphasized. “We try to get everybody to ship early in the month, but, generally, the week before Thanksgiving is really insane.”
The work does not stop with larger companies, as home-based Ginger Roots Bakery is also preparing for the season.
Lauren Fullerton, of Kyle, started her business in November of last year because she loves sourdough and she knew that she wanted to share her passion with her neighbors and friends. Then, the interest escalated, more people were asking for it, so she opened a bakery from the inside of her home to balance with her lifestyle as a mom of three kids.
While sourdough is the main item on her menu, she also makes a lot of homestyle cookies — such as chocolate chip and pumpkin coffee cake — scones and pies, which are a new item this year because of the cottage law that now allows refrigerated items.
“My cookies will change from fall flavors to more Christmas-y flavors. So, my signature cookie is my gingerdoodle cookie, which is a cookie I came up with [and] kind of inspired the name of the bakery. It's kind of a crossover between a gingersnap and a snickerdoodle and it’s really, really good,” she said. “That's one that will be kind of highlighted this season and I'm really excited to get that back up there because I took it out in the spring … Then, the pies, of course, I do a pumpkin pie, like a pretty classic pumpkin pie, and then, I do a bourbon apple caramel pie, which was really popular for my friends.”
What she also likes to do at the beginning of every season is hold a small gathering within her community of neighbors and others close to her to do a taste test. She brings out her new flavors and the ones she wants modified to get feedback she trusts.
Also, in preparation, she looks at what she is capable of doing in her home kitchen, as she only has one oven, compared to a commercial bakery that could have multiple. Last year, around the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, she had upwards of 30-40 orders per week.
“Baking pies and cookies and all of this, it is just a lot of time management and ensuring that I write everything down by the hour,” she said. “What am I doing? How can I make sure that this is going in at the right time, cooling at the right time? It’s kind of just like a conveyor belt within myself. It's just a one woman team and so, I'm just like, 'cookies in and cookies out.' It’s a lot of time management.”
Previously, her ordering process allowed for people to choose any day of the week to place an order for the upcoming week and Fullerton would cut-off 48 hours before. However, now, with a new platform she is using, she sets the pickup date, which is Fridays, and it's available for viewing for the next two weeks — that is also cut off a little less than 48 hours before pick-up.
She takes holidays into consideration, too, when it comes to ordering, ensuring that pick-ups won’t fall on the actual holiday, but the item will still stay fresh.
“I don't do pickups on the actual holiday. So, for Thanksgiving last year, for rolls and such, I did pickups until the day before, so the day before Thanksgiving, and then, same with Christmas, but for Christmas Eve, so it was like two days before Christmas Eve or the day before Christmas Eve,” she explained. “I don't do pickups the day of strictly because I've got kids and they're my priority … I try to push it as close to the holiday as possible, so that it's as fresh as possible.”
Learn more information about the bakeries and to find where to place an order at, visit:
• Tootie Pie, located at 3992 US 290, Building 200, Dripping Springs: www.tootiepieco.com
• Ginger Roots Bakery, a home-based bakery in Kyle: bit.ly/4pczvq9
