Sebastopol, Santa Rosa hardware stores among those doing big business in pie. Here’s how it all started

At Sebastopol Hardware Center, across from a rotating display rack filled with umbrellas and seeds and beneath a display of battery-operated edgers and weed trimmers is a freezer case full of ... pies.

As in the kind you eat.

“It’s usually one of our top 100 items every day,” said Dan Allingham, general manager of the sprawling store on Gravenstein Highway. “It’s a very lucrative, profitable item.”

You’ll also find pies at Guerneville Fulton and Bennett Valley Ace Hardwares in Santa Rosa, Garrett Ace Hardware in Windsor and Healdsburg, and at Ace locations in Calistoga, Lakeport and Clearlake.

Pie at hardware stores? What gives? In honor of Pi Day, March 14, a day originally intended to celebrate the mathematical constant pi but since co-opted to celebrate flaky confections, we endeavored to find out.

Our investigation took us to The Pie Company based in the Central Valley community of Ripon. According to the company’s website, they sell their pies almost exclusively through hardware stores and in a few select markets and produce stands.

The company started making pies in 2008 and their business grew steadily. We’re not sure who hit upon the idea of pairing pies and hardware, but they did, and the phenomenon began to spread gradually north and west. Eventually hardware store owners in these parts caught wind of how fruitful pie sales were with their counterparts down south.

Guerneville Fulton Ace Hardware began selling them in January 2023 after hearing about Sonoma County residents who were driving to a Westlake Hardware in Alamo in the East Bay to buy pie. Other stores soon followed.

Allingham says that The Pie Company provides stores a freezer and comes every couple of weeks to restock pies made with fruit they grow themselves or source from other Central Valley growers.

Calls to the company to find out why hardware stores became their main sales venue went unanswered, but they’ve clearly found a niche.

North Bay stores carry about a dozen varieties including apple, boysenberry, peach and strawberry-rhubarb which can be baked from frozen in just over 90 minutes. Each store sets its own price, but they hover around the $20 mark.

“I’m from a family that never buys anything frozen, but I’ve tried all of them,” said Sebastopol Hardware garden team lead Dana Swirsding, with a somewhat sheepish look.

Swirsding said the store will celebrate Pi Day by baking pies on its Traeger grill on Thursday, something she says they’ve done more than a few times already.

Allingham, a former Costco bakery manager, learned about the pies from a family member who saw them for sale at an Ace Hardware in the Central Valley. He decided to start selling them last year when he was unable to find a whole cherry pie locally for his 4th of July celebration.

He said he went to Mom’s Apple Pie three miles up the road from Sebastopol Hardware but they didn’t have any cherry pie, and other local stores only sold quarter pies.

Allingham is mindful about competing with a local institution like Mom’s. He says Mom’s is a destination and the pies there are fresh baked, while the ones his store sells are frozen and are more often purchased on a whim.

With a few taps on his phone, he pulled up the number of pies he sold during the final six months last year: 1,255.

“Twelve hundred pies at a hardware store is weird. It’s weird, but it’s cool,” he said. “It’s a great impulse item right by the register. You don’t come to the hardware store thinking ‘I’ve gotta get a pie’. But when you’re in there, you think, ‘Shoot, I could use an apple pie. I’ve got a dinner tonight.’”

But at Bennett Valley Ace Hardware in Santa Rosa, general manager Nick Chase says they do have customers who come in just for the pie, which the newly expanded store began selling last November. They’ve been a hot ticket item ever since. Chase estimates they sell about 50-60 pies each week.

“We sell more pies than we sell birdseed. I wish I was kidding,” said Jesse Luis, a team leader at the Bennett Valley store.

Asked what their top-selling varieties were, Luis took an educated guess of mixed berry and peach, which Chase confirmed with a quick look on the computer.

While Pi Day gives people a good reason to enjoy a slice of pie, sometimes they’ll make their own excuses to indulge in the dessert that can also double as breakfast.

Chase and Luis recounted one customer who came in to buy a pie and admitted to them she was getting it all for herself while her husband was out of town on vacation.

Numbers aside, Luis just likes how people light up when they discover pie on a mundane errand to the hardware store for a toilet plunger or can of paint.

“It’s nice to see people walking out of here with a pie and a smile on their face,” he said.

You can reach Staff Writer Jennifer Graue at 707-521-5262 or jennifer.graue@pressdemocrat.com. On X (Twitter) @JenInOz.