Pie Bird Bakeshop: From Farmers’ Markets to Storefront Success with Delicious Pie
Julius Ayo
September 12, 2026
Three distinct pies sat prominently on a green table inside a Ballard bakery, and owner Hanner Jacobsen could account for every single layer contained within each of them. “At Pie Bird Bakeshop we are known for our buttery, tender crust, which is why our fruit pies, such as the strawberry nectarine, are extremely popular,” she told Seattle Today.
”They have crust on the bottom and on the top.” That exact signature crust is at the heart of what Pie Bird is built around. It serves as the primary reason a business that spent seven years operating without a permanent address managed to build a deeply dedicated customer base across two weekend farmers markets, a recurring subscription service, and a bustling catering operation.
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Jacobsen does not diversify her inventory to play it safe; she focuses exclusively on pie, relying entirely on the art of what happens between the fruit and the pan. Therefore, there are no layer cakes, no cookies, or any laminated pastries hedging the bet.
“Hi Seattle, my name is Hannah Jacobsen and welcome to Pie Bird Bakeshop,” she said as she invited us into her store. “I’ve had the business for about eight years.” For the vast majority of that time, her operation was entirely nomadic. “I was just doing farmers markets, pie clubs, and catering, and I was very happy with just doing that.”
Remaining small and manageable was a conscious choice, and Jacobsen was quick to acknowledge that expanding into a physical store was not always part of her vision. “The idea of a brick-and-mortar sounded really daunting and expensive,” she said. What ultimately shifted her perspective was not an overwhelming desire to scale up, but the overwhelming demand she witnessed every weekend. Week after week, her inventory sold out so rapidly at market stalls that the data outgrew her initial hesitation.
“But at a certain point I felt like I was ready for the next challenge, and I felt really validated by how popular our product was at the farmers market,” she says. “I decided to take that leap of faith and to get my own brick-and-mortar.” That transition brought her to 2218 NW Market Street, taking over a storefront previously occupied by Pie Bar. She announced the relocation in May 2025 and officially welcomed her first customers that July.
Setting up a store at that location carried personal significance to Jacobsen. Her great-grandparents moved from Norway to Ballard, where they ran a local boarding house on Ballard Avenue, which is just a short walk away from where her bakery is located today.
When she opened the doors to her permanent home, Jacobsen resisted the common urge to broaden her menus, opting instead to double down on her core concept. “What sets us apart is that we just do pie, which is not actually very limiting, because there’s so much you could do within pie,” she said. “We can do fruit pies, custard pies, cream pies, even savory pies.” Her approach highlights the strategic advantage of specialized baking. While full-service bakeries must split their attention across dozens of distinct product categories when in competition, a single-product bakery competes entirely on depth. By spending eight years perfecting one fundamental craft across hundreds of market events, Jacobsen developed a level of quality and consistency that anyone, including larger, broader bakeries, struggles to replicate quickly.
That commitment to depth is evident in Pie Bird’s construction of pies. Their passion fruit meringue pie is a great example, it is one of Jacobsen’s popular pies. Her classic butter crust is used as the base, but the top layer features crushed crust mixed with additional butter and brown sugar. Beneath that crumble sits a sharp passion fruit and lemon curd, crowned with light Italian meringue. Her chocolate bourbon pecan pie follows a similarly precise formula.
“It has a thick layer of bittersweet chocolate on the bottom, pecans, and then on top of that we pour our bourbon buttery custard,” She explained. Rather than just dumping a basic filling into a generic crust, every pie is treated as a series of intentional culinary decisions.
Her approach can be traced back to New York. After graduating college in 2015, the Seattle native moved to New York City and worked as a professional baker at Petee’s Pie Company. There, she learned how to scale up pie production without compromising on high-end ingredients or traditional methods. Today at Pie Bird, she combines European-style butter with stone-milled flour harvested from Washington’s Skagit Valley.
She also sources roughly 90% of all her fruit and produce from nearby small-scale farms, meaning the bakery’s menu changes naturally alongside the local harvest calendar. Eight years after starting with her first market stall, the pie business has grown from a recipe inspired by her grandfather and wild blackberries into a shop on NW Market Street, a Pie Club delivery service, and a popular spot where customers line up before opening.
