On any weekday from 4pm until closing at 9pm, and throughout the day and evenings on weekends, Mission High students are on staff proudly serving pie made with pumpkins they planted last Spring, sharing their knowledge about food and farming, and generally doing a bang-up job serving great coffees. One evening last week around closing, one of these young superstars reflected: “This is the first real shift of the first real job of my life… I think it went pretty well.” They are supported by motivated staff who have joined us with extensive experience in specialty coffee, food, and environmental education. Karen is here each morning, clucking like a mother hen about the Pie Ranch-Mission Pie link, and getting her thrills on the espresso machine. Mission Pie is pursuing a green business plan, and choosing products and purveyors who share our values of being conscious of our choices down to the farm level. Along with our own product, we are proud to be serving the very locally-produced Mystipies and to be the first café in San Francsico to brew Taylor Maid Farms coffee.

We already have morning regulars who grab a coffee and pastry on their way to work, or sit and sip with us in the coziness of the café. And we’ve already gotten great reviews on Chowhound and Yelp.

Mission Pie is an embodiment of our commitment to help urban folks connect more deeply with the agricultural sources in our food system. The notion to create Mission Pie was stimulated by a conversation with Mission High students, who reminded us that simply getting to Pie Ranch is a challenge for youth and families without cars. We recognized the importance of taking a role in building the urban anchor for our programming, and offering our youth partners an opportunity to be ambassadors of a healthy food system in their own community. Mission Pie is the result: A business partnership that Karen established with Joe Schuver and Wil Mills of Destination Baking Company in the Glen Park neighborhood in SF. Joe is well-loved neighborhood baker who grew up on a farm in Iowa, and aspires to teach baking, and thus found the invitation to cofound Mission Pie irresistible.

Mission Pie’s management team has recently grown to include Krystin Rubin, baker and co-founder of Bread and Butter Baking Company in Jamaica Plain, MA. Krystin’s first stop in California was an internship at Tip Top Produce, an organic farm in Vacaville. Krystin’s scope of experience and desire to be part of a project that represents the whole arc that connects farm production with baking production makes her a perfect fit for the manager role, and Karen is beside herself with glee about working alongside Krystin.

For a year, we worked with a dedicated group of volunteers to conceptualize and actualize Mission Pie in its first phase. After a year of operating at this scale, Mission Pie will grow to occupy the whole ground floor of the building, including baking on site. This process will invite neighbors and friends to participate in visioning, planning, and supporting the growth of this enterprise. On a related front, we’re excited about participating in an upcoming large public community dialogue in June that will be coordinated by Karen’s partner Marc’s organization, Neighborhood Assemblies Network, and Neighborhood Public Radio to imagine what our neighborhood can be. Stay tuned…