“It’s extremely busy,” said Lenore Estrada, owner of Three Babes Bakeshop, amid cartons of bourbon pecan pies and cookie samplers piled to the ceiling.
The popular Mission pie business, which for years operated out of a shipping container or farmer’s market booths, is gearing up for its 13th holiday season. It is only the second season at its brick-and-mortar shop at 2797 16th St. near Folsom Street.
What used to be three babes is now one — Estrada is the last of the bakery’s three founders still working there. Nevertheless, Estrada has grown the pie shop’s staff to 19, just enough to knock out 4,000 Thanksgiving pies in four days.
“We’re just very into operational excellence here,” said Estrada, 40, who found the time to give birth to her third child (an adorable little girl) weeks before the bustling Thanksgiving season. “We’re able to make more, because we are disciplined about our systems. Like, we began planning for Thanksgiving in July.”
She compared the daily operation of Three Babes to the breakfast factory former Intel chairman Andrew S. Grove referred to in High Output Management, a “legendary business book.” In that example, Grove writes about what one would need in people, technology and ingredients to deliver 1,000 breakfasts on time.
Estrada thinks about the assembly of thousands of pies in the same way. “I think there aren’t many people that can do what we do at the scale and quality that we do, and that’s because of our commitment to our systems,” she said.
On the side, Estrada is the board president of SF New Deal, a pandemic-born nonprofit that supports small businesses. That started thanks to a $1 million pandemic donation from former Yale University classmate Emmett Shear from Twitch and Y-Combinator.
At Yale, Estrada studied history and, after graduating, she tried stints at tech companies like Google. But her childhood of baking apple pies with her dad had a stronger hold.
She and two other friends figured there might be a business in it and they started in 2011 with weekend pop-ups in a shipping container in Stable Café’s backyard on Folsom Street. Anna Derivi-Castellanos, another “babe” and Estrada’s childhood friend from Stockton “knew about Stable Café, and she walked in and brought a pie to the owner to pitch him on the idea of having a pop-up in the shipping container. And he said ‘yes.’ So that was where we initially were.”
They baked from 4 p.m. to midnight in a commercial kitchen in South San Francisco, which they rented for $600 per month. “We’d always be there until, like, 4 a.m.,” said Estrada. “When I first started the business, I didn’t mind working like 20, 24 hours in a row, working all night.”
Before the pandemic, according to Estrada, 80 percent of Three Babes’ sales went to corporate office settings, like delivering a pie for an office birthday party, or serving Google or Twitch employees for breakfast.
That went to zero during the pandemic, and she has yet to see them come back. “The downtown return to work hasn’t really picked up yet,” she said.
No matter; she’s had plenty of challenges in the new space on 16th Street. The most recent came after the deluge on New Year’s Eve last year. “Our space flooded,” she said. Almost a year later, the coffee counter and bathrooms are still unusable.
In 2024, she hopes to remedy that and to launch some new products, including breakfast pastries and lunchtime offerings.
But for now, she’s putting the spotlight on Three Babes’ Christmas treats: The popular apple pie and bourbon pecan pie, her personal favorite key lime pie, and a cookie sampler. That sampler includes a Mexican wedding cookie recipe that provided 1,000 servings for her own wedding, some recipes from Derivi-Castellanos’ grandma and some recipes developed over Three Babes’ good and bad years.
You can still order, here.
Congratulations! Great story. Neighborhood hero! 19 jobs in the Mission. 3BB is part of the solution. Nice work. Continued success.
Hey tech workers reading this, please get the companies you work for to buy 3BB pies for gatherings and events.