familiar faces ■ by Barbara Ruben | photo by Matt Mendelsohn
Heather Sheire (left) and Wendy MacCallum
Life of Pie A tiny, homespun bakery has found its sweet spot in Arlington. NORMALLY, THE LITTLE bakery on North Glebe Road whips up about 1,000 pies a week, in flavors ranging from Southern pumpkin praline (which in 2017 won honors in a Sports Illustrated pie-tasting contest) to salted caramel chocolate chess. But in the two weeks before Thanksgiving, its yield is close to 5,000. “We call it the Superbowl of pies,”
says Heather Sheire, who co-owns Livin’ the Pie Life with fellow Arlingtonian Wendy MacCallum. Apple, pumpkin and pecan are the “trifecta” of Thanksgiving pies, she says, although Key lime is sometimes a wild card favorite as well. In August, the pair were already placing orders for pie tins and bakery boxes to get ahead of any supply chain issues that might threaten to dis-
24 November/December 2023 ■ ArlingtonMagazine.com
rupt their busy season. During the holidays, they beef up staffing with college students home for breaks. On occasion, they have even rented a truck to transport apples from a Maryland farm to their kitchen. They typically go through 4,500 to 5,000 pounds of the fruit from October through December. Preorders for Thanksgiving close in late October, but the bakery also sells pies to walk-in customers, and demand can get a little frenzied as Turkey Day approaches. “On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, we throw open the doors and sell every single thing we have,” says MacCallum. “We’ve had lines around the block.” As kids, neither had pie-in-the-sky dreams of one day opening a bakery, though both had relatives who instilled a love of cooking. MacCallum’s family had a restaurant in Florida. “Baking, and sugar in particular, was always what I loved,” she says, remembering the simple Key lime pies of her childhood. Sheire grew up in Seattle, where her uncle taught her to bake fruit pies with produce from local orchards. “I was his little acolyte. He let me roll out the dough. That’s how I got a passion for pie,” she says. Blackberry has always been her favorite. By 2012, Sheire had moved east and was living and raising kids in Arlington. She started baking scratch-made pies out of a rented church kitchen and selling them at the Clarendon farmers market. When she met MacCallum through the Barcroft Elementary School PTA, she knew she’d found a kindred spirit and business partner. “We laugh a lot. We were playing show tunes and got along like gangbusters from the start,” Sheire says. “It was hard physical work, but we were having so much fun. And all these years later we still like each other.” At first, they worried there wouldn’t be enough demand to keep their venture afloat, but soon they had a devoted following. “People would be waiting
